Christos Tsiolkas has breakfast with JJ Marsh - Trailer

The Greenhouse Funny Competition

I have a clear teenage memory of reading a book with my sister on a winter’s afternoon, both of us squashed into an armchair and laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe. I can still remember the smiles of our parents as we repeated phrases to each other and shrieked and cackled and wiped our eyes. The book was The Diary of Adrian Mole.

Michael Bond’s Paddington Bear, with his peculiarly English sense of humour. Dr Seuss and the joy of playing with words. Roald Dahl’s subversive glee. Le Petit Nicholas, Superfudge, Lemony Snicket. The one thing they all have in common? They made me laugh.

I accompanied a young friend round the bookshop this week. Vampires, death games, dark fantasy and a fair bit of pink glitter. Where are the laughs in that lot?

So I was cheered to hear about The Greenhouse Funny Competition.

Greenhouse is a literary agency, run by Sarah Davies in Washington and Julia Churchill in London, which exclusively represents and manages the careers of authors writing fiction for children, from young chapter-book series through middle grade novels to sophisticated teen fiction.

Here’s Julia on why a Funny Competition.

“At Greenhouse we love all sorts of writing for children. We love edgy, wincingly close-to-the-bone YA fiction, we love thrilling, commercial concepts with big surprises, and beautiful and heartfelt younger stories. I could keep going, but in short, we love quality. And there’s something that Sarah and I agree that we don’t see enough of: Funny.

I had the idea for a prize because every time I sit down with an editor and ask what they’re looking for, they generally say, ‘Funny. We need humour’.

The prize is representation by Greenhouse AND a full weekend ticket to the Festival of Writing in September.

So what are you waiting for? If you’re a resident of the UK or Ireland, get submitting.

Send the first 5,000 words PLUS a short description (a few lines) of the book AND a one page outline that shows the spine of the plot.

If you are submitting a picture book (or shorter fiction that comes in under 5,000 words), then send the complete text.

Please send your entries to funny@greenhouseliterary.com

The deadline for submissions is Monday 30 July.

A Rose for the Winner

A hundred years after what came to be known as the Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the Alliance Of Radical Booksellers chose to commemorate the centenary with the award of the first ever Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing.

The award aims to “promote the publication of radical books, to raise the profile of radical publishing, and to reward exceptional work.” Eligible books must have been published in 2011, by author’s or editor’s whose primary residence is in the UK, and are “informed by socialist, anarchist, environmental, feminist and anti-racist concerns, and primarily will inspire, support or report on political and/or personal change.”

“The central involvement of radical bookshops in the establishment and running of the Bread and Roses award also really sets it apart from other book prizes,” says Nik Górecki of Housmans Bookshop, one of the trustees of the award.

Fittingly, the prize was awarded on May Day 2012, in the Bread and Roses pub in Clapham, London. The judges –  children's novelist and poet Michael Rosen, lecturer and feminist author Nina Power, and Festival Director of Liverpool’s annual Writing on the Wall Festival, Madeline Heneghan – came to a close decision, with two books from a shortlist of seven vying for the top place.  

Nicholas Shaxson’s Treasure Islands: Tax Havens And The Men Who Stole The World, was commended by the judges for its thoroughness of research, and ‘usefulness’ in the current political climate.

But it was David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years that came away with the award. Presenting a beautiful sculptured metal rose to the winner on behalf of the judging panel, Power said:

“The winner of the first Bread and Roses prize for Radical Publishing has written a text that breaks many rules, and does so excellently in each case: this is a book that covers so much material, refers to so many historical periods and geographical spaces, that the reader is dazzled – not only by the easy erudition of the writer but about how much it is possible to learn and with so little pain.

“It’s a book that has the appearance – and at 534 pages, literally so – of a fearsome academic tract. But it avoids everything that frequently plagues academic writing: this book is instead engaging, readable, relevant, motivated by a clear political will and utterly indispensable not only for understanding the terms of the world we live in, where they came from, but also for what we do about changing them. It is a book written from the heart, albeit with the aid of a library the size of a palace – a people’s palace, that is!”

Nik Górecki and Nina Power   

The notion of judging radical writing brought up some interesting questions as to how to evaluate desirable qualities, says Górecki.

“As this was the first year the award was given, the trustees wanted us to talk that out and think about what we were actually asking of radical publishing,” explains Power.  “We talked about whether it was a problem if a book was essentially academic or whether we wanted something that had already garnered a wide appeal.  But our major political dicussion was around whether we were looking for something that diagnoses the present or summarises the past -  or something that points the way forward.”

Górecki says, “We hope that as the prize continues in the future this is something we will continue to address, and that readers, writers and publishers will debate. We are starting this process by holding a panel discussion on the 9^th May at Housmans Bookshop with Pluto Press editor Anne Beech, anarchist blogger Ian Bone, and Guardian journalist Suzanne Moore, asking ‘What makes good radical writing?’”

In the light of recent events, it is perhaps not surprising that so many of the books from the shortlist were concerned either with economics (as both Graeber’s and Shaxson’s books were) or with protest movements.

Nadia Idle with co-editor Alex Nunns

Nadia Idle, one of the co-editors of the shortlisted Tweets from Tahrir, talked about the challenges of creating a book from an essentially ephemeral, fragmentary source.

“We set tight limits on ourselves – only posts from Tahrir itself, and only those in English.  The timescale was compressed too.  Just eighteen days, so in a sense the narrative thread was already there.

“We also made the decision that every single person involved should agree to our using their tweets.  It helped that I came from that Egyptian activist background.  I knew who to contact and people didn’t see us so much as a bunch of outsiders coming in to make money off their backs.

“Immediacy was very important. We went with OR books because they had a model of being able to turn round a book very fast.  The downside of that is that they use print on demand, so there have occasionally been supply problems.”

Authors of radical books, more than most, must be able to pull off the trick of transforming themselves from writers shut away with their own computers to campaigners championing their own books.

Tim Gee

Tim Gee, author of another shortlisted book, Counterpower: Making Change Happen, told me:

“At heart I always see myself as a campaigner.  For a year or more, the main thing I was doing was sitting in my room obsessing over every last sentence: is this phrased in the right way, is the spirit of this right, is this said as well as I can say it?  But I started writing the book after climate camp last year and finished it sitting at the base of Nelson’s Column on the day of the anti-cuts march.  I saw the book a continuation of the work I do in grassroots training and empowering. I have lost count of the number of workshops I have run since the book came out, but it’s definitely broken the forty mark.”

How healthy is radical publishing at the moment?  Perhaps surprisingly, given that the publishing world is often seen these days as growing increasingly narrow, people here are optimistic.

“Radical publishers are actually doing very well,” Power says.  There is a demand for coherent, non-patronising and interesting political writing that isn’t being served by mainstream publishers.  Since economic crisis, for example, people are looking for a demystification of terms surrounding financial speculation.  Lots of material is successfully crossing over from blogs into print.  I don’t buy the argument that people’s attention spans are killed.  People can follow Twitter and still want to read books.”

 “Among NGOs there has been rush for centre ground, targetting the as-yet unconvinced,” says Gee.  “That’s opened up a gap for individuals from social movements to fill the more radical space.”

“Radical publishing is going through a renaissance, making the establishment of the Bread and Roses Award timely,” says Ross Bradshaw of Five Leaves Publishing

Power agrees.  “One of the critiques of exisiting prizes that they can be introverted, cliquey and corporate. So this is a very strong prize, with the aim to ensure the future of radical publishing.”

A full description of the shortlisted books can be found at http://www.radicalbooksellers.co.uk/?p=184:

Writing is Therapeutic but not Therapy?

We often pick up our pens to make sense of our worlds, but when you have fled your home country and survived torture- can writing be therapeutic, and if so, should it be classed as therapy?

Following on from our articles in the August and December issues of Words with Jam, LAILA SUMPTON looks at the different ways that English PEN, Freedom From Torture and The Baobab Centre use the power of writing for the rehabilitation of conflict and torture survivors.

English PEN campaign for the freedom to write and read, and their creative writing workshops provide a safe space for survivors of conflict to learn the craft of writing and tell their own stories when they are ready . PEN’s writers have run over 200 creative writing ‘workshops in the last year in prisons, detention centres, refugee centres and schools.

There is a balance being struck between creative writing being used as an art form and as a tool for rehabilitation. Philip Cowell the project manager of the program said that “creative writing is therapeutic, but creative writing is not delivered as therapy. The workshops help refugees define themselves and manage their trauma by defining it”. Joelle Taylor, the writer who led PEN’s creative writing course for twenty young refugees and helped them produce an anthology called “Brave New Words,” said they “turned every wound they had received into a poem.”

PEN has worked with numerous poets and each brings their own style and content to the workshops, which vary in levels of participation. Some writers will have their sessions completely planned out- but others like Nii Parkes encourage participants to guide the content. Writers are central to PEN, Phillip said “it is a charity run for and by writers, and writers are PEN’s greatest resource.”

But are writers qualified to help participants express such volatile emotions? With safeguards in place like ensuring writers have counselling or equivalent qualifications, are trained by PEN, and are supported by staff working at the refugee centres; writers are made aware of the boundaries of their role.

Marion Baraitser who runs biblio-therapy sessions for young people at The Baobab Centre for Young Survivors in Exile, has a different take on this, she was “shocked at how few qualifications practitioners have” saying that “writers have to try and fill in the gaps of their experience.” Marion felt that psychology and social work training were necessary for understanding participants and “learning how to control yourself as a facilitator- so that you know your limits.”

The Babobab Centre is a unique non-residential community centre for young people and children who are separated from their parents and are struggling with trauma. In Marion’s biblio-therapy sessions young people discuss a chosen piece of literature that relates to their own experience of conflict, abuse or torture. They think about themselves through a character, and re-narrate their own life story in a way that can gradually help them go from being a victim, to a survivor.

Marion makes sure that no upsetting literature is used, the emphasis is on identifying with the positive aspects of characters’ survival in stories so that young people can build up their sense of self-worth and confidence. Using printed literature is sometimes challenging for the young people, especially those who have English as their second language and come from an oral storytelling tradition. However, discovering that people from other cultures and times can experience similar feelings of loss and fear is something that the young people really value, and they often share literature from their home countries too.

Unlike in PEN’s workshops, written responses to the literature are not structured or edited- as it is the process of them relating to the literature that is key. Marion felt that using creative writing as form of therapy for child survivors of conflict and torture should not be encouraged; as they needed to slowly understand and deal with their experiences, before trying to be creative.

Freedom from Torture assist, protect and promote the rights of torture survivors in the UK and Sheila Hayman runs “Write to Life,” a creative writing project which helps adult participants explore their experiences of torture and the difficulties of living in exile. In the group sessions survivors share a meal and learn about creative writing through general and positive topics, they also share lyrics and stories from their home countries and present their written work when they are ready.

In the individual creative writing sessions Sheila and the workshop volunteers help the survivors shape their own stories, and when a part of their story is avoided or written without emotion, they help them revisit these emotions and complete the story. For Sheila the sessions are as much about creativity as they are about rehabilitation, and half of the participants are also supported by clinicians alongside these workshops.


Sheila told me about a former child soldier who was subjected to horrendous treatment including being forced to kill others and eat human flesh. He felt that the “Write to Life” sessions were particularly beneficial because he was able to move at a pace he felt comfortable with.

Some rehabilitation projects shield survivors from public events, but “Write to Life” members have used their work to raise awareness, and this is a major motivator for the group. The groups’ eighth anthology is called “Body Maps” and can be ordered from their website. The group will be working on a monthly basis with the Tate Britain to explore the new exhibition on “Migrations”, and an exhibition of “Write to Life’s” work will form part of Refugee Week in June.

The writers who facilitate these groups all work with great sensitivity and care, and one of the greatest challenges that their groups face is the uncertainty of their asylum statuses, with survivors sometimes being deported before the writing course had ended. Currently expressive and creative writing is not widely used for the rehabilitation of trauma sufferers, and according to Marion, “writers are viewed with suspicion by therapists, because their work has a therapeutic impact but the writers are not therapists.” However, when managed in a participatory way it can empower and inspire survivors and create a community of solidarity.



If you would like to read more, Words with Jam's original article on Write to Life can be found here and our article on Therapeutic Writing, here.

An Alliance of the Real Innovators

“Hello. We’re here. We’re at the London Book Fair and we’re here to stay!”

Thus, in a room overlooking one of the great bastions of the traditional publishing industry, Orna Ross launched ALLIA - the Alliance of Independent Authors.

ALLIA has already kicked off meet-up groups in Florida, San Francisco, Japan and Dublin, and hopes to get one going in London following this launch. A key part of the Alliance is the sharing of information and they intend to have live on-line groups too, initially twice a month, as well as “real people on the end of a help line.” And everyone, please note: the online version of the ALLIA launch will take place on the 19th May at 13:00 EST!

The morning was structured round two panels. The first, chaired by Joanna Penn of The Creative Penn, was a selection of those providing the self-publishing tools: Tom Kephart from CreateSpace, Teresa Pereira from Blurb UK and Michael Tamblyn from Kobo. Amazon’s role in the self-publishing world is well known. They offer services such as CreateSpace for print books, Kindle Direct Publishing for Kindle ebooks and Amazon Author Central for book promotion.

Tom Kephart of CreateSpace began by asked the audience what they wanted from the Amazon offering. “UK based services,” came back the answer. “No more waiting three weeks for print books to be delivered from the US.” And “Electronic transfer of money.” Was there a Kindle ‘pixie dust’? A key to success? If there was one, it lay in metadata. Metadata allows Google, Twitter, blogs etc to work in concert and allows readers to discover your books.

Kobo had hoped to launch their self-publishing platform at the London Book Fair, Tamblyn said. It is currently in beta and will be rolled out this quarter, with plans to expand to a dozen new countries in 2012. They are also hoping to introduce Kobo Pulse, which will allow authors to write comments in the margins of their own texts, to create a dialogue with their readers. “When authors are given control and visibility, they do amazing things that the traditional publishers out there are just not doing.”

Tamblyn pointed out that Kobo are selling 16% of self-published books in South Africa and 14% in Africa and the Middle East, and some of this is because authors are free to set prices at a level that customers in these markets can afford.

Blurb began as a print on demand service that catered for artists, with tools aimed at beginners as well as experts. They aim to produce high quality books that “represent who you are.” Developing communities, among authors and between authors and readers, is important to them. In 2011, they released their ebook platform. Currently their ebooks are simply replicas of their print books, but they are looking at developing ebooks that are “enhanced without being over-complicated.”

Blurb has printers on every continent (though as the print facilities for Europe are based in the Netherlands, this can still mean a 7-10 day delay in receiving a book ordered in the UK).

Both Kobo and Blurb are open platforms that do not impose exclusivity deals.

The author panel, chaired by Sam Missingham of FutureBook, consisted of four authors with widely different experiences of self-publishing.

Linda Gillard was a well established, award-winning, mid-list author when she was dropped by her traditional publisher for ‘disappointing sales’. Her agent tried for two years to find her a new publisher, but she was repeatedly told that her new book was ‘unmarketable.’ However, she had a loyal fanbase who, when she finally admitted that she’d been dropped, persuaded her to self-publish. At one point last summer, she was selling 100 copies a day, and this ‘unmarketable’ book has now achieved almost 30k downloads overall.

“When I finally realised I was successful as an indie author and that I was going to go indie permanently, I felt elated. There was a real sense of creative freedom.”

Her key advice to authors was to not to think about making sales but about building new relationships with readers.

John Logan is a writer from the remote Highlands of Scotland, more at home on his farm than talking to London-based editors and agents. He self-published his first novel in 2011, after receiving ‘rave rejections’ from editor after editor who loved the book but couldn’t get it past their sales departments. He had 700 downloads in the first seven days.

His role models, he said, were “writers like Tomas di Lampadusa, who never published a word in their own lifetimes.”

Words with Jam columnist, Dan Holloway “didn’t have a clue” about publishing when he first went on line in 2008. He encountered a great deal of snobbery and skepticism about self-publishing and decided it “must be worth exploring.” Having a background in the world of Art, he was disappointed that people didn’t talk about literature with the same degree of passion and controversy that they would talk about, say, Tracy Emin or Damian Hirst.

His approach to self-publishing was not about selling books or making money. He wanted to find a space where you could ask interesting questions and where there was a freedom to fail. “In the traditional publishing world today, you can’t even fail once.” He has written an interactive novel online and loved the immediacy of getting feedback “even as you write the book.”

Joni Rodgers, from The League of Extraordinary Authors, is a Texan author and fan of Amazon. “It’s like that big sandworm in Dune,” she says. “Sooner or later you realise, either it’s going to swallow you up, or you’re going to get up there and ride it!”

Rodgers straddles the worlds of traditional and self-publishing. Having published celebrity memoirs with one of the big publishing houses, “I’ve been to the puppet show and seen the strings.” But the publishing economy is tough at the moment, and they can’t afford to take risks. She sees self-publishing as “the high ground for creative risk takers and for the books that don’t fit into the pitch at the marketing meeting.”

Right now she is self-publishing a novel with Kindle Select about the relief effort in Houston that followed Hurrican Katrina – a book that had “too much sex and too much politics” to make it through that marketing meeting.

“I’m riding that sandworm, baby.”

There was some discusson of the pricing strategies used by the different authors. It was clear that there was often a ‘sweet spot’ at which a book would start to sell, but that point varied from country to country and book to book. People paid “less for an ebook than they would for a greetings card” but at the same time, the author could still be making more per sale than they would from a traditionally published book sold at full price.

All the authors agreed that it could be tough to get a review for a self-published book. But at the same time it was recognised that the mediators were changing. Book bloggers were becoming far more influencial than traditional print reviewers, and their attititude to self-publishing generally more responsive.

The strongest feeling, throughout the whole morning, was that here, among self-publishers, was where the real revolution in publishing was happening.

As Orna Ross said in her closing remarks, there have been certain pivotal moments in the story-teller’s art: from bard to scribe, from scribe to printing press. And now we are on the cusp of another massive shift.

I couldn’t help thinkingof all the Independent Booksellers I have interviewed in the past few months who, when asked about self-published books, grimaced slightly and sucked their teeth. There has to be potential, surely, for an alliance independent authors and independent booksellers – both of whom are capable of innovation that leaves vast, unwieldy corporations standing.

If anyone can make that happen, then perhaps ALLIA are the ones to do it.

Anthony Horowitz at the London Book Fair

It’s just as well Anthony Horowitz talks fast. The Literary Café is packed to bursting with his fans and when Lindsay Mackie of English PEN asks for questions from the audience, hands shoot up all over the place.

Horowitz begins by confirming that sad news that there will, indeed, be no more Alex Rider books. But there will be one more book from this universe. He is planning a novel showing the young life of the assassin Yassen Gregorovich, and taking him to the point, at the end of Stormbreaker, where he fails to pull the trigger to kill Alex.

Horowitz says that it took him, ‘about five seconds’ to decide to write the Sherlock Holmes sequel, Road of Silk, despite being well aware of other YA writers who had failed to make the transition to adult books.

He has started to question whether, now his own children are adults, he ought to still be writing for children. “Perhaps it’s time for my generation of writers to step out of the way and make room for a new wave.”

He is passionate about the stripping away of the schools library service, which he sees as an even bigger issue than the shutting of public libraries. And he speaks movingly about his work with young offenders in prison.

In response to Mackie’s skeptical query, he insists he really was given a skull for his thirteenth birthday. (“I’m not sure if it’s weirder that I asked for a skull or that my mother went out and bought one for me.”) It sits on his desk to remind him that his time is not infinite. The plan, he says, is that he will end up the same way, to make a pair of bookends.

He shows us the fountain pen and spiral-bound notebook in which he writes all his first drafts, before switching to a laptop for subsequent drafts, "and to become an instant expert in every make of German machine gun, or whatever." The sound of a pen scratching across the paper keeps him connected with writers of the past, he says, and he doesn't want "Bill Gates or anyone else coming between me and the creative process."

Intriguingly, he lets drop something that could keep the cryptographers among his fans busy for decades. His books are apparently littered with purely private jokes and puzzles – hidden names, anagrams, first letters of sentences that spell out something...

“I’m on my own working for ten hours a day – I have to have something to keep myself amused,” he says, before going off to tackle a lengthy line of autograph seekers.

Why I shall be supporting the Alliance of Independent Authors

By Dan Holloway

This Wednesday the Alliance of Independent Authors will launch at London Book Fair. Set up by bestselling author Orna Ross, this is an organisation designed to promote the interests of self-published authors in today’s changing publishing environment. And their first campaign is to get self-published authors a higher profile at literary festivals.

I am notoriously phobic towards organised anything, and have spent much of the past year being highly critical of many of my fellow indie authors, but this is a cause I am absolutely thrilled to get behind, and I couldn’t be more excited that I’ve been asked to be part of the author panel for the launch, which will take place from 10am on Wednesday 18th April in the Old Press Room at the London Book Fair (Earls Court). I do hope you’ll come and find out more.

One of the things I was asked in advance of the launch is why I became an indie. This is the answer I gave – prickly and idiosyncratic but one that Orna was more than happy to receive – and that is another reason why I’m so happy to be involved – this is an umbrella organisation that doesn’t require homogeneity – and surprising as it may seem for an indie community, that’s a rare thing!

Self-publishing was a very simple choice for me to take. Back in 2007 I decided I wanted to give writing for a wider audience a proper chance. Like most writers, I’ve always written and I have my share of drawers full of emo poetry and really angsty teenage novels, but at 35 it felt like the right time to give it a proper bash. I churned out a thriller set in Oxford, and set about fine tuning it with a view to getting an agent and then a publisher. To this end, I joined the writers’ sites Youwriteon and Authonomy in 2008, where I soon discovered I preferred writing literary fiction to writing thrillers, and by mid 2008 I had churned out a second book, Songs from the Other Side of the Wall, a literary work set in post-communist Hungary about a girl growing up and trying to find her place in a world where nothing is constant. I set about finding an agent for it, still rather wet behind the ears and not really knowing anything other than that “this was what you did.”

I had a lovely letter from the only agency I really wanted to work with (one that focused on international fiction) saying how excited they were by the book but they couldn’t sell it in the current climate. At about the same time I was learning more and more about the vibrant literary world that existed online, and I started to wonder why I’d ever looked for a publisher in the first place. I wasn’t interested in making “a big splash” as the agent had put it. I wrote because I had something I needed to say, in whatever form it needed saying – whereas publishers wanted to tell you how you should be saying it in order to get sales. I didn’t want sales. I didn’t even want readers overly much. I wanted to get what was in my head out of there in the form it wanted.
And I wanted to play with what was and wasn’t literature.

I’ve always loved art since a school trip to the Tate introduced me to Rothko. I’d spent hours at the infamous Turner Prize exhibition of 1999 and fallen head over heels in love with Tracey Emin’s work (and, it’s probably true to say, with her). Songs from the Other Side of the Wall is set largely in the art world, and references Emin’s works throughout. Art was very very exciting. My childhood and young adult heroes were artists – Rothko, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Basquiat, Emin and Lucas, the Wilson Twins, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Rachel Whiteread. Art was heady, dangerous, talked about, argued about. It incited passion. And whilst I was aware of the storm over Satanic Verses, that was hardly the same as the reaction to Sensation, to Marcus Harvey’s portrait of Myra Hindley. Yes, YBA was full of marketing and slick and surface and phoneyism. But it was also dangerous, challenged the way people thought about art, about the world, about themselves and reality.

Literary culture just wasn’t like that. And aspiring writers just talked about how to get published. That wasn’t a conversation I was interested in. I wanted people to talk about literature like they did about art – I wanted to work with people who were doing wild things that would have people shaking their head and asking “but is it a book?” The whole world of getting published was, quite simply, a different conversation from the one I wanted to have.

Of course that was simplistic. But it remains the case that the most exciting discussions of words take place “in another place” and not in the world of publishing. I have also been saddened rather than heartened by much that has happened in self-publishing since the launch of the Kindle. Self-publishing is now (and fair play to everyone concerned) a place where people can set out their stall and hope, with a following wind, marketing acuity, and great writing, to make a decent crust. Which means its landscape is much like the landscape of mainstream publishing. And the conversations self-publishing writers have are, now, about how to market, how to format, what their sales figures are. It is a conversation that is increasingly squeezing me out the way regular publishing did. Or, rather, it is a conversation that regularly threatens to subsume me the way regular publishing did, and that would be my biggest single piece of advice to a self-publisher – remember why you’re doing it and don’t be a magpie. Don’t let sales or invitations or publicity distract you – unless they were the reason for self-publishing, in which case go for it.