Sandstone Downloads

16 Mar 2005 in Highland, Writing

Watch Those Cobwebs Shiver

ROBERT DAVIDSON loves paper-and-ink books as much as the rest of us, but the director of Sandstone Press is equally passionate about their new niché publishing venture into downloadable e-books – novellas and translations of poetry

THE FIRST THING you have to say when you’re talking about electronic publishing is that everyone really wants a book. Yes, I really do mean everyone. Not just the author who wants it for the shelf and eventually passed on to the grandweans; everyone !

Childstruck grannies on silent babysitting missions want a book. Young lassies home from college want to curl up with one on the settee. Bored clerks skive off with them to the loo. For train-bound commuters they are, of course, a necessity. Librarians live to stack them on trolleys and wheech them round the shelves. Suggest books might be on the way out and watch those cobwebs shiver. They’re not, of course; but say it anyway.

They are wonderful things, aren’t they? You can heft them in your hand; juggle them in pairs if you want. Seductive arty-farty pictures on the front and come hither prose on the back. And nothing smells of newness the way a new book does.

All this before you get to substance: that might be humour, history, biography, philosophy – or doctors and nurses or cowboys. Personally, I can’t resist. Here are a couple of other facts. Generally they are between two and three hundred pages long, much of it flab. Of course, they might be twice that. Cost? These days about eight quid.

What you won’t find, as a rule, is the finest form of fiction writing going, the novella. What we are talking about here is probably between ten and twenty thousand words long and might be called, just for example, Of Mice And Men or The Old Man And The Sea or Brokeback Mountain .

“The Internet is the natural home of the novella.”

The books – I mean the physical objects – are just too slender to persuade the reader they are worth the price. This is the age of the whopping, intricate, multi-volume fantasy. Hard copy publishers won’t take the risk except with a long established ‘classic’ or if the writer turns up with a stunner they can sell on the back of something already huge.

Annie Proulx brought out Brokeback Mountain in a dedicated volume before it appeared in Close Range. You can bet your mortgage to a worn out wellie though, it wouldn’t have got a reading if The Shipping News hadn’t already conquered the world. Brokeback Mountain . God, how I love that book.

Over here at Sandstone Towers we are getting quite experienced at e-publishing through the Sandstone Review, using it as an inducement to visit the web site and also as R&D for more commercial publications to come. We’d already learned that people don’t like such a long read when they are looking at a screen, but they do like more expansiveness than the usual two to three thousand word story allows. The Internet, therefore, is the natural home of the novella.

We’ve picked up experience elsewhere as well. Through the Sandstone Vista Series in hard copy we learned not only that dyslexia sufferers prefer a cream coloured background but that we do also. That is; people well used to reading also prefer not to read from the shining white background that is common on the Internet.

We applied this lesson to the Review and feedback was positive. And when it comes to fonts, san serif is better; it seems to matter that it is less cluttered. Full justification isn’t required; left is sufficient, in fact better. There is more room for design and we really took advantage of that when we turned to poetry. For some reason it doesn’t seem to get in the way as it does on hard copy. Wait till you see what we’ve done with the two Annas’ book; but I’ll get round to that.

Pondering all this we decided there could be a way ahead here. There really could be something new in the offing that no one else had thought of. We’d need money though. Yes, we’d like to earn some to reward the participants, and to reinvest. We could shell out a certain amount but we’d have to have some chance of recouping it. How then, to deliver?

We looked around and decided on PayLoadz. Readers have to establish an account, but many will have made Internet purchases already through PayPal, or traded through eBay. It didn’t seem too much of a risk to point them in that direction.

“This being such a first [our first authors] had to be brave, but they had to be bloody good as well.”

That accepted, the full package of design and delivery was quickly put in place. We would get Edward Garden Graphic Design to create the PDF downloads in the fashion he does the Review, and have Dynam Graphics develop the web pages much as they have for the Sandstone Vista Series. Dynam also tightened up the nuts and bolts of the selling system and the web site re-edit.

Now all readers have to do is visit the ‘Fiction’ page, click on the first title, Coming On Strong by Ron Butlin, establish an account if they don’t already have one and, abracadabra, the file will be sent to them as an email attachment. Safely downloaded, they can tuck it away in a suitably created folder ready to be paired with whatever comes next. They can do the same for Anna Crowe’s wonderful translations of the Catalan poet Anna Aguilar-Amat, Music And Scurvy.

I’ve already given away who our first authors are, but by this time it’s hardly a secret. This being such a first they had to be brave, but they had to be bloody good as well. I had my ideas on where to turn. Anna Crowe’s translations of Anna Aguilar-Amat featured in Northwords 30. Everyone on the magazine was knocked out and I’ve been searching ever since for a way to take them to a wider audience. We’ve run up against a few walls since then, Anna and I, but here at last they are and I have no regrets. In fact, I’m pleased as punch.

In Northwords 34, with Ron Butlin as the new Reviews Editor and a notion of widening the section’s remit, we ran an article from Barcelona-based artist Anthony Pilley. Seeing the obvious connection I got him on the phone and secured a particular image that we all found attractive and suitable, although in an oblique kind of way. We’ve used it not only as front art but as a sort of chapter break. Tony’s web site is at www.barcelonaprints.com and I recommend it for a visit.

Ron I first met quite a few years ago in Kerry when we both read at Listowel Writers Week. Since then our paths have crossed from time to time. I called him up and gave him the brief. He thought about it and agreed, then settled down and produced this wonderful story. It’s based substantially on his own life, although very definitely fiction. It’s touching and witty and has, to my mind, that elusive hard-to-define truthful element you tend to recognise immediately you come across it. Judge for yourself.

Pretty soon we will have the Gaelic novellas online, the Sandstone Pearls Series. We have been working very hard on this with the Gaelic Book Council, as has our first author Flora MacDonald. I think they are going to answer quite a few needs in the world of Gaelic literature. A second text is already with us and we’ll trail them out in sequence.

“The vertical screen at arms length does the job, but the e-form comes into its own when the screen can be tilted and lowered, as some desktops now can”

Let’s talk a bit about the reading habit. Okay, agreed, everyone prefers a book. We are all just so used to them. So accustomed are we it’s about impossible to imagine the world without them. Actually, they don’t go back all that far, not against ritualised chant or other forms of tale telling. Popular access even less so. To illustrate this we put a quote from Geoffrey Chaucer on the Home Page – no printing presses then, and the expansiveness of the Internet was unimaginable.

Right now I am reading my own words, as I write them, from the screen of an object that looks very like a television set. This is design for you. When the first motorised vehicles were manufactured they were called horseless carriages and that is exactly what they looked like. The designers made them resemble the very objects they were going to replace; but that was just the starting point. Very quickly they evolved into flat lorries, sports cars, saloons, delivery vans. A more determined purpose demanded a more particular shape. One size, very definitely, did not fit all.

It seems the thrust of present design in computer hardware is in putting more and more function into smaller and smaller units. Can this last? Pretty soon, I think, the computer will find itself in all kinds of shapes for all kinds of functions and the reading object is going to look and feel something like a book does now.

It’s likely though, to hold the contents of the Mitchell Library. Likely also to scroll rather than turn pages. Of course delivery will be by download. Fear nought, this will be better than the books we know, or it won’t take off. The contents will also be much, much cheaper and hard copy, which will never go away, will eventually belong entirely to the world of art and craft.

The vertical screen at arms length does the job, of that there is no doubt, but the e-form comes into its own when the screen can be tilted and lowered, as some desktops now can, and on the laptop that can be treated almost as a lectern. We’ll know the world has changed when we see them coming out on trains and buses and busy travellers escaping into the otherworld of books. Yes, I’m still using that word – books. Some things are just too good to let go.

If you are interested in seeing the future as it happens visit the Sandstone Press web site now. Downloads come in at £2.35, affordable, affordable, affordable. And if you want to read these works this is the only way to do so. This is the place, the means, the method, there is no other. For more than one reason I hope you join us. Remember, the maguffin is still the same as for Chaucer: human activity, thought and feeling. All the rest is delivery, convenience, cost.

It’s still all about fallible humanity, miller’s tales, bishop’s tales, knight’s tales, wives’ tales, tales of young men and women finding their way in the world on the unrepeatable journey we all make. It’s about beautiful language. Effie, my new PA, just left for the wee room with her laptop so this seems a suitable place to end. What a trooper that woman is. Never stops.