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 near Ullapool 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, just where the road runs out on the far west coast of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides (see map on left sidebar). We keep two small flocks of registered rare-breed sheep (Hebrideans and Jacobs), a couple of breeding sows, Roman geese, Cayuga ducks, a miscellany of hens, and a Kerry milk cow is forthcoming in January 2012. And with our raised beds and Keder polytunnel, we plan to become self-sufficient in vegetable production. We love good books and good literature; we love good film and art, but we're not much into popular culture. We don't have a TV, don't know one end of a celebrity from another, and don't do much in the way of 'networking'. If you're interested in how we navigate all that, check out our blog, House of the Ravens.
From all of this you'll gather that we're a bit different from most publishers, even from other small independent presses. Although we've always been (and remain) committed to high-quality ethical publishing, it is one part of the richness of our lives, not the whole of it. Over the past few months we've struggled to refocus Two Ravens Press – both the kinds of books we publish, and the way that we do business – to integrate it better into our own lives, reflecting changes there as well as changes in the publishing sector and the larger world around us. If you care to, you can read about all that here.
There's quite a bit of information about our publishing model on this page. If you're thinking of submitting a manuscript to us then we do suggest you read it, because in some very real sense we publish authors, not just their books. We've had great experiences in the past with writers who've understood the values that led us to adopt our current publishing model and who have actively chosen to work with us in the ways that we believe are sound and ethical. But it isn't always so. Please be sure we're the right publisher for you before you start to engage with us.
On the other hand, if you just want to skip to the specifics of how and what to submit, click here.
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, a 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 literature 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.
Our approach to publishing
We are very different from most publishers in the way that we approach publishing. We live in one of the remotest regions of the (already pretty remote) Outer Hebrides on a working croft; we spend as much time as we can outside and with our growing collection of animals. Taking care of the animals and the croft must always take priority. When we're not editing or typesetting our next book, trying to get an author on the radio or packing up books from website orders and making the post-office run, we stare at the sea a lot or talk to the pigs (they have a surprisingly large conversational repertoire). We share a lot of values with movements like the Transition Network, The Dark Mountain Project, off-grid living, and other ways of responding to an increasingly insane consumption-and-growth-driven world.
In line with all this, we have absolutely no desire for big-city offices and all their trappings. We don't do glittering celebrity-studded launches, we don't do hype and we don't do fashion. We really don't find such things interesting, let alone valuable. We publish only what we want to publish and really believe in, sell only in ways that we consider ethical and to outlets that we can work with with some degree of mutual respect, and there are some activities associated with both traditional and new publishing models that we just don't do and will not be persuaded to do ('tweeting' springs to mind ... as does excessive 'viral' online marketing. The name says it all ...) We don't publish for big sales figures (which isn't to say that we wouldn't like some ...), rather we publish only work that we love and that we believe really needs to be published. If you're an author proposing to submit a manuscript to us, it's important that you've understood all of this and are able to work with us – not in spite of it, but precisely because of it.
This doesn't in any way mean that we're not serious about publishing. We are small and yet we are professional: we do our very best to get our books reviewed, and publicised to the widest appropriate audience, and available for purchase in the most appropriate outlets. And we take our books very seriously: as well as publishing new writers we also have published 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. Take fiction: the average small-press literary novel, especially by a new writer, is very 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 hundred. Sometimes she might only shift a hundred even if she does get out there and work at publicising it. And yet we have a number of books, written by especially active authors, that have sold significantly more copies than that. (It is worth pointing out in this respect that many new literary novels even from from bigger publishers, including those longlisted or sometimes even shortlisted for major literary prizes, often sell no more than a few hundred 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. Carefully targeted nonfiction can often do better – but again, so much depends on the author. If you can't live with the possibility of these figures, then you may want to think very carefully about what you might reasonably expect from being a writer.
So: we do not have either the time or the funds to put into big publicity campaigns; as small part-time publishers based in the Outer Hebrides, we (like many bigger publishers) we absolutely 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 all these senses, 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! (Those tend to be services you pay for ...) Rather, we see ourselves as two professional writers and literature-lovers 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. Which we may or may not make back. Because we ourselves are successful writers, and because we are in this business 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. Again: we're not just publishing a book, we're publishing a person. 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.
How we publish
Over the five years of our existence, we've learnt a lot about the traditional publishing model – the one where you get a lot of submissions, accept one or two, pay the authors advances which you desperately hope the book will earn back, print and attempt to sell huge quantities of every title basically in order to pay the wages of distributors, warehouse staff, wholesalers, retailers etc etc ... struggle with bookshops, large and small, who buy a bunch of your books and then return them all unsold (and in varying conditions) a few weeks later ... You can read more about how publishing actually works (or doesn't, in the case of small publishers) in an article we wrote called 'The Real Story: publishing, four and a half years on'. Just click on the link. Now, happily, we've moved on from that model, and found our own individual, flexible and practical way of coping with the daily 'doom and gloom' messages about the future of the book that litter the daily publishing press.
And so in future, flexibility is the cornerstone of Two Ravens Press. We'll choose the book production model that best fits each new book and its audience, using a variety of traditional book printers, print-on-demand, and e-book technology as appropriate. We’ll select the best distribution and sales models in the same way. We'll aim to continue forming close partnerships with our authors from the beginning, to ensure that everyone's expectations are realistic and that each book reaches the widest appropriate audience with the full and active participation of its author.
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 actively lose money and so 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 not the publisher for you either.
Our main outlets are online (our own website, Amazon, The Book Depository and other online retailers). We do of course make our books available for purchase by any real live bookshop that wants to stock them, but experience has taught us to select very carefully the bookshops that we actively market to. Although it may seem counterintuitive, getting large numbers of your real live books on the shelves of large numbers of real live bookshops really isn't always the best way to sell them. It certainly isn't the best way for a small publisher to stay in business! (More on all that in 'The Real Story: publishing, four and a half years on'.)
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. We typeset carefully and professionally, and work very hard to ensure that our covers complement the ethos of Two Ravens Press, the content of our books and the aims of their authors, rather than simply going along with the latest cover fashions. We produce covers that we love, just as we publish books that we love.
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.
