About Us
Two Ravens Press was set up in November 2006 by two writers, Sharon Blackie and David Knowles, operating originally from a working lochside croft in the north-west Highlands of Scotland. In May 2010 we relocated to another croft by the sea, in the wild and beautiful region of Uig on the far west coast of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides (see map on left sidebar).
Why We Publish
Everything that we publish, we publish with passion. We love each of our books. They say something about the author, they say something about us, and they say something about the time and the place they were born into. Each book is a person we like being around. Because each, in its own way, fights back against formulas and homogenization, against the analgesic washing-out of colour that threatens to fade our bright thoughts.
And no, agreed, this battle-cry is not enough. We need to put substance behind it. We need tooling-up for the job. We want scalpels and spanners and great big wrenches; we want literature: literature that follows conventional narrative structures, or literature that goes beyond them. Innovative literature, beautiful and ugly literature that speaks of its time and its people. We want the beautiful that breaks your heart – the real one, not the mawkish, sentimental one that can grow in its place. We want clever – much cleverer than us – we want not-afraid-to-be-clever, we want something to aspire to in its entirety. Not the clever elements of a formula, and not the clever charlatans who hide behind ‘clever’ and disappear up their own backsides. This is not a game. This is the Alamo. We want ideas, we want the language that Albert Camus demanded should ‘disorientate and challenge us’. We want language as a rallying flag, as a sanctuary, a bayonet, a broom. We want what Cormac McCarthy wanted when he said that a book only matters if it deals with issues of life and death.
What We Publish
'Contemporary, cutting-edge, innovative, risk-taking, challenging' – these are the kinds of words we use throughout this website, and as we move into our smaller, more focused 2011 list and beyond, these are the ONLY kind of books we're interested in, whether we're talking about fiction (short, novel-length or novellas), nonfiction, poetry or anything that falls between these classifications. We're interested in books that make a difference; books that show us a new way of looking at the world, a new way of being in an ever more challenging environment; books that takes chances with style, language, structure, narrative...
When it comes to fiction, we're more Cormac McCarthy than Jodi Picoult, more Samuel Beckett than Ian McEwan. We don't do conventional literary fiction about everyday concerns and family crises; we don't want satires, either. We want fiction that deals seriously and in new ways with big issues, with the fragility of civilisation, with new ways of being in a crumbling world.
Perhaps it helps to talk about the fiction we don’t publish: we do not publish 'comic', children's books (including teenage/ 'young adult' or 'crossover' books), romance, chick-lit, westerns, horror, science fiction or fantasy, family sagas, regional sagas, historical sagas or any other kind of sagas. We don't publish genre (including crime and historical fiction) unless it's cutting-edge literary genre. We're kind of interested in dystopian fiction but it has to be literary, innovative dystopian fiction. Not just another plot about a different way that the world might end.
When it comes to poetry we don’t want anything that remotely approximates rhyming doggerel. Pretty description isn’t enough, either. We want poetry that has something original and unique to say, that shows us a different way of looking at the world.
Our requirements for non-fiction mirror our requirements for everything else: we're looking for work that matters, that makes a difference. We are particularly interested in literary nature and environmental writing; writing that looks in an intelligent, informed and creative way at the issues that we face in the world today and how we might deal with them. Books that offer a new paradigm for living. This does not include wildlife or travel guides or religious and faith-based books, or spirituality, New Age and self-help guides. Please don't send us local history books either, or your personal memoirs or those of your Auntie Flo, or technical/ academic textbooks.
How We Publish
We are small and yet we take our books very seriously: as well as publishing new writers we also publish authors of the stature of Whitbread Prize winner Alasdair Gray, James Tait Memorial Prize winner Alice Thompson, and the late internationally acclaimed Franco-American experimental writer Raymond Federman.
Nevertheless, it is important for any prospective authors to understand that publishing the kind of books we publish does not provide us with anything remotely resembling a living. The average independent-press literary novel, especially by a new writer, is lucky to sell 500 copies: if the writer in question doesn’t get right behind the book and actively seek out opportunities to promote it, she’ll be lucky to shift a couple of hundred. (And yet two of our novels, with very active authors, have sold well over 1000 copies.) The average poetry collection might shift 2-300 copies – IF its author is especially active in getting out and giving readings. Poetry books are sold by their authors, not in the shops. Unless you're Seamus Heaney. We do not have the time or the funds to put into big publicity campaigns; we need our authors to get out there and help sell their own books – without which, in the current challenging and bestseller-obsessed marketplace, we can guarantee that they will flop miserably!
In that sense, Two Ravens Press is for us more a vocation than a job or a profession. We do not see ourselves in any way as part of a publishing ‘industry’ that ‘employs’ or ‘pays’ authors. Neither do we see ourselves as working for or providing a service to authors – secretarial, social or otherwise! Rather, we see ourselves as two professionals with a wide range of skills, who will take a chance on you and invest a great deal of time and money into publishing your book. Because we ourselves are successful writers, and because we are in this purely for the love of it rather than for any serious expectation of financial gain, we expect our relationships with our authors to be based on mutual respect, trust and cooperation. If we don't believe that such a relationship is likely, then we won't work with you. When you accept an offer of publication from Two Ravens Press we expect that you will enter fully into the spirit of working with a small independent press, and that you will support us as much as we support you.
What else is different about our publishing model? Well, for example, we do not support excessively high retail discounts (anything above 50% is, to us, an excessively high discount) in order to sell our books. The reasons for this are twofold:
- First, because we believe that such discounts and promotions have been the major contributors to the demise of innovative literary fiction and the narrowing in scope of the book market in the UK.
- Second, because we would go out of business if we operated at those discounts.
In 2008, as part of a series of efforts to get Two Ravens Press noticed in the book world and by the book-reading public, we participated in seven different high-discount promotions with two major high street book retailers. We made a loss on every single one of those promotions. We cannot support a system in which the price of hype for a book is financial failure for its publisher. We also understand, of course, that many authors will want to see their books in such big retail promotions, and if this is important to you then for sure we are not the publisher you want. If you'd rather obsessively count your Amazon rankings three times a day and so send all your friends to Amazon to buy your book (where, because of high costs, we can hardly ever make a profit) rather than to our website (where we might just run the risk of making a profit) then we're probably not the publisher for you either.
There are a few other things that we believe make us stand out from the average small press:
1. We care deeply about the craftsmanship of our product: our books are high quality trade paperbacks with distinctive designs and often with cover flaps and coloured endpapers. We work very hard to ensure that our covers complement the content of our books and the aims of their authors, rather than simply going along with the latest cover fashions.
2. We care about our product's impact on the environment: we are committed to supporting environmentally friendly printing processes and the use of Forest Stewardship Council-accredited paper in all our books. In our office we recycle everything that we can.
3. We also care about our authors. We will always work with an author to ensure that their book is edited professionally, and thoroughly if necessary, so that it is the best it can be. However, it is our policy to respect an author's voice and to maintain the integrity of their vision for their work wherever we can.
For specific submissions guidelines, please click here.
