Friday 22 May 2009

BELIEVE IN INEPENDENT PRESSES...BUY JUST ONE BOOK!

Salt Publishing has been wearing its heart on its sleeve this week... and the response from people seeing their messages has been moving, extraordinary. It's a little like Peter Pan's exhortation to make Tink better by believing in fairies. Their message is this:

BELIEVE IN INDEPENDENT PRESSES. HELP US LIVE. BUY JUST ONE BOOK.


Words from a Glass Bubble has risen to 24 in the Amazon charts of short story collection sales.Tania Hershman's The White Road and other Stories is higher than that. No 6 or something. And two other Salt collections, Balancing on the Edge of the World by Elizabeth Baines, and Sawn Off Tales by David Gaffney are in the top 100.
This is like the top ten of my teen years, only better!

I have all those. So I just bought a few more copies of Ballistics, by Alex Keegan. A fabulous, fabulous collection. I use it to teach from, and someone always wants my copy....I have to have backups.





If you read this, you probably read blogs where Salt’s message is reproduced in full. It doesn’t matter where you buy a book from. But please…


WRITERS: support one of the best independent presses in the UK. Let the Arts Council grant money they should have had pay instead for established writers with mainstream contracts to research their next novels …(this is like the parliamentary scandal!!) but LETS BACK THE INDIES!


READERS: In the end, the variety and depth of books available is thanks to the indies. Without them, we’d lose access to the work of countless authors, poets, novelists, short fiction writers. The real shelves and online shelves would be bursting with WAG memoirs, and time fillers for beaches. Mostly.

Salt Publishing books can be bought direct from SALT PUBLISHING HERE
From AMAZON HERE from The Book Depository HERE and can be found or ordered in good bookshops.




4 comments:

Writing For My Life said...

Hi Vanessa,
Just wanted to say that I hope things work out for Salt. The world really needs all the independents it can get, and Salt are doing important work.
Congrats on the hike in Amazon sales. I have read Words From A Glass Bubble and the stories are wonderful. I thoroughly enjoyed it and will be recommending it to all my friends.
I would like to suggest though that all independent publishers are going through a difficult time at the moment, and they all need supporting. My selfish reason for speaking up is because I am published by Mercier Press, a Cork-based publisher who produce beautiful and important books. Last year, they published a collection of my stories, entitled 'In Exile', and they are just about to bring out a second collection, 'In Too Deep'. (You'll find them on Amazon, if you look under Billy O'Callaghan... In Exile is somewhere in the high millions...)
I'm thrilled, of course, that I have someone who wants to publish me, but if 'In Exile' thought me anything, it is that we face a constant uphill battle as far as sales and much-needed publicity are concerned.
Again, my best wishes to Salt. I'll be digging deep over the weekend for a few more tomes. Good luck to all!

Jac said...

Thanks for the prompt V. I have just bought the White Road. Seemed right, somehow.

Vanessa Gebbie said...

Hi Writing for my Life... ansd thank you for your message, your support for Salt, and everything else. Don't worry about 'selfish' reasons... we all have to pubicise our work as brst we can. Give me a day or two and I'll put something on the blog about 'In Exile' and 'In Too Deep'.

Vanessa Gebbie said...

Hi jac

Thanks for supporting Salt! And you will LOVE Tania's book.