It’s here at @http://tiny.cc/9kq6a

Publishing doesn’t thank you financially – not in the short-term at least, and only occasionally in the long-term. But I think I always knew that, because when I started at fourteen, I saw a magazine not go into print because of lack of funds, and when I was seventeen I canvassed for adverts for a magazine that barely made covered its print costs. However, technology, I believe, has given us new options, made publishing exciting and full of possibilities to explore. You don’t need to start with a huge budget anymore – if you’re prepared to learn all the skills (as I have) you need less than a week’s wages to get started in publishing. I often say that if I the technology we have today existed in 2001 when I started flipped eye publishing, and I had the knowledge I have gained over these nine years, we would be a much bigger company, with much less financial stress. Of course, I had to pay my dues somehow, having never studied literature or publishing before I started, so I guess it’s only fair. And the landscape has changed so much too; I can’t count the number of small bookshops that went out of business with our stock unpaid for, Borders went with a bit of our flesh too, and – in the old days – Foyles chipped at our bank balance too, although they have reformed admirably as I have stated in a recent blog on focal (flipped eye’s own blog).

I could go on about small trials and triumphs all day, but the bottom line is nobody forced me to do this job. I do it because I love it – I have worked with writers who used to be in the army, used to be gardners, counsellors, computer programmers, lawyers; writers from India, Peru, Nigeria, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Jamaica… Conversations are never boring, the lessons are endless. You may not make a truck load of money, but it’s a great life – at least I think so.

Anyway, to end the flipped eye publishing residency on incwriters, apart from thanking incwriters, there are three things I’d like to say:

1. Naturally, support the writers whose posts you have seen on here – especially the young ones – they truly are the future; they read, they listen, they edit, they write, they are about to devour the world
2. If you work in publishing, publish with the same enthusiasm as always, but print with restraint; in nine years working in publishing in the UK I have seen some of my most-admired small presses go under because they insisted on using the old school model of printing 1000-5000 copies of a title and praying for sales. Go for short runs, explore digital options, sacrifice margins for stability because small publishers are absolutely essential to the evolution and growth of the industry – because of our unique size, we have a vision that neither self-publishers nor huge publishers can claim to have.
3. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and please buy one of our books so we don’t have to start a campaign begging you to! For those of you who missed any of the earlier blogs by flipped eye writers, you can see all of them by clicking here.

Thank you for reading.

N. A. Parkes

Nii Ayikwei Parkes
2010

www.flippedeye.net
www.niiparkes.com

Take for example the poem that I am currently working on, it has come from an uncle who a mouthful into  breaking his fast, picks up a misshapen dumpling, looks at my mother and says Leila, this reminds me of the foetus I found bundled in my bedroom when we were kids. How do you explain the craft, the process, how the inspiration came to you, if it came to you through another person?

A guest in our house a few years ago, lifted his trouser mid-conversation to expose a leg concave with wound, the whole room laughed as he told the story of being attacked by a polar bear while travelling by foot from Russia to Italy, trying to escape the war.

Maybe it is resilience that inspires me. Ordinary people, whose stories seem almost impossible, people who then tip their heads back and laugh, lift both hands to their face and whisper something grateful to God before offering you some sweet tea.

My mother’s friends are keeping me awake at night, the images of these women flinging themselves out of council estate windows, diraac ballooning mid flight. I am stuck on the first line. The dead cannot come home and tell us why they jumped, what was so bad that they did not want to live. Maybe it is surviving that really inspires me, and I cannot write the poem because they are not here to say it their own words first.

Warsan Shire

Warsan Shire
2010

Warsan’s pamphlet, teaching mother how to give birth (edited by Jacob Sam-La Rose) is set to be the final publication in the mouthmark series.
Blog: www.warsanshire.blogspot.com
Twitter: @WarsanShire

The subject came along a couple of years ago when I moved to a road where a beautician owns a black Mitsubishi Warrior advertising her trade in pink lettering down the side, non-invasive facelifts and so on. I speculated about why she should need such a fuck-off vehicle and concluded it must be to carry the drums of fat she extracts from her victims. Tying this in with the fashion for exotic meat on the menu: meerkat, kangaroo, etc, Mr-Croc-in-a-Blanket was born. So, you are what you eat.

Short stories are what everyone works on when they start out, before they know any better, said a well-known author. I struggled for years, another writer told us. No one wanted to read my stories. Not agents, not publishers, not even my Great Auntie Moira. Then I realised, wait a minute, what if I just add more words and characters? Now I have two best selling books. That’s a success story.

One by one, like former addicts in a support group, each writer stood and talked about how they overcame their desire to publish their short work. These were professionals brought in to instruct us about the craft, about finding inspiration and struggling past rejections to find their inner voice. Blah. Blah. A small handful had actually published a collection. A few others had only magazines or anthology credits. All of them saw the story as little more than training wheels for the novel – the warm-up act to the ‘real’ gig.

You will be fine if you look at it as a way to get your name out there, pay your literary dues, a third writer suggested. The underlying message being that stories were unformed, immature impulses that would eventually segue into bigger, better things.

I wasn’t the only one that left that seminar that afternoon with a heavy heart. What hope can be derived from being told you should forget your first love to focus on a more saleable effort? But were the writers echoing what the establishment had been telling them for years, or did they really feel short stories had less merit than novels?

By the age of four, I was a pro at reinventing reality, pushing boundaries to anyone who would listen. ‘Lying’, my parents called it, but the impulse to spin seemed effortless, as natural sounding as the voice of truth in my head.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons why stories don’t always get the credit they deserve. It comes too easily – not the work, but the urge to tell tales.

The novel is less natural, more artificial. It takes conscious effort. A great book is an awe-inspiring work – a redwood tree with complicated roots; a crisscross of networking vines absorbing everything in its path. Like the Borg, the novel can assimilate.

Short stories are like optical illusions – blurred butterfly wings one minute, dark lingering beasts the next. They’re impressionist paintings – snapshots that can’t easily be captured and tagged, inevitably transforming into something else when you get up close.

Perhaps it’s this impish brevity, this Loki-like characteristic of uncertain and unsubstantial matter that makes writers mistrust the form. After all, if a child can successfully invent a story, there must not be much art to it after all.

The thing is, a good short writer can precisely and lethally inject both substance and movement into their work, often in just a few pages. But thanks to the advice given at workshops and creative writing courses, newbies are not encouraged to stick with it, so they don’t improve.

Instead, they are urged to move to longer forms even when it may not be their forte. They in turn encourage others to do the same, and so forth. It’s a vicious circle. The media propagates the myth by periodically claiming that the short story is alive and well – and it is, but only among a minority.

Readers don’t want short stories anyway. That’s what the publishing industry tells us. Readers want big, fat books to read on trains and holidays. So the storytellers jump the rails and get busy thinking about permanence and how they can stand out among other redwoods. After all, how can a fleeting moment compete against a TREE?

Niki Aguirre

Niki Aguirre
2010

Website: nikiaguirre.com
Twitter: @virtualonion

This is the first year for the Lumen/Camden Poetry Competition and it’s the initiative of poet Ruth O’Callaghan, founder and organiser of the Camden and Lumen Poetry Series. This popular project supports the homeless in the Cold Weather Shelters in the Camden and Kings Cross areas of London, and all income from the competition will go to support the same cause. None of the people involved in organising the competition will take any income from it, so it’s set to give a real boost to the amount donated by the project every year.

Poetry is really making a practical difference in helping the homeless thanks to Ruth’s tireless efforts and wonderful new initiatives. The Lumen/Camden Poetry Competition will not just benefit the people in the Cold Weather Shelters, but it will also help a poet to get their pamphlet into print. With entries invited from all over the world there will be poets of all standards joining in to help raise money for charity while competing for the prestigious prize of being selected by Carol Ann Duffy, patron of the Camden and Lumen Poetry Series.

The winner will receive 50 copies of their pamphlet to keep, sell, or give to friends. They will also be invited to read at the regular Lumen and Camden venues, if they can make it and would like to, and their pamphlets will also be offered for sale online and at the twice-monthly events. All money raised from pamphlet sales by the publishers and by the Camden and Lumen project will go to the Cold Weather Shelters.

The closing date is early next year on February 14th, but it’s never too soon to enter. Entry fees received from now on will go towards helping the Cold Weather shelters as winter approaches. The pamphlet will be published by Ward Wood Publishing, and full details on how to enter are on the website http://www.wardwoodpublishing.co.uk

You can enter by post by sending your poems and a cheque to Ruth O’Callaghan, or you can send the poems by post and pay by Paypal if you prefer. For international and other entries it’s possible to enter by using Paypal and then either posting the poems or sending them in an email. Regulars at events can hand their entry to Ruth, who will pass them on to Carol Ann Duffy. Full details are on the Ward Wood website.

Do join in and also post details about this competition on your own blogs and websites as the competition is likely to raise a substantial amount to help the homeless while also giving a poet a highly desirable prize.

Much to my family’s consternation, I’ve neglected to leave my MacBook at home.  I seem to be the odd one out in both clans, primarily because I don’t believe in neglecting email and other such virtual delights and obligations whilst on holiday.  In much the same way that my so-called bad habit is a point of annoyance for my kin, their reaction is, for me, a source of intense amusement.  I spend perhaps ten to fifteen minutes at the end of each activity-packed day, whether at sea or on shore, checking my email and responding to blog comments.  On an average day back at home in England, which is distinctly lacking in gorgeous sunsets and delicate white crabs camouflaging themselves as seashells, I spend perhaps two to three hours online per day.  One would think that my holiday quotas were a distinct improvement, but somehow, they’re twice the crime.

For writers, I think that unplugging (in the most literal sense of the word) is frequently difficult.  I’d like to know that my laptop is on-hand for when that inevitable perfect moment of inspiration hits.  My travels have long been a source of reflection, and although the writing produced when I’m in transit isn’t always necessarily about the places I’m visiting, the resulting poems and prose are infinitely richer for my separation from the mundane.  In much the same way that I dream more vividly when I’m travelling, I find that my waking reveries benefit in a similar fashion.

And, let’s face it: if I didn’t keep up with my email, I would have missed this blogging deadline!

Adrienne J. Odasso

Adrienne J. Odasso
2010

Adrienne is the author of Lost Books, recently shortlisted for the London New Poetry Award
Twitter: @ajodasso
Web: http://ajodasso.livejournal.com/ | Facebook Page

From Vooks to ebooks, from the iPad to the Google settlement, and from print-on-demand to new styles of writing, this article attempts to analyse the effects of the digital revolution on the publishing industry, and to make some educated guesses about how things may develop in the next few years.

“An alternative to the Big Publishing model is already with us, and despite the odd viral phenomenon it consists in the main of very large numbers of small-scale products reaching small audiences, rather than small numbers of very high-profile products reaching huge audiences. This alternative model is enabled by digital technology, and it replaces high production values and market-minded editorial controls with the principle that people’s desire to publish themselves and to look at each other’s efforts is itself a profit motor.”

To read the whole article, go to http://www.hyperex.co.uk/reviewdigitalpublishing.php or http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=406 .

- Edward Picot
personal website – http://edwardpicot.com