Drawing 3

Obtaining funding for a publication

While digital printing has considerably reduced the cost of producing books, this does not mean that the costs are negligible. Depending on how much work publishers are prepared or able to undertake themselves, the costs can vary from hundreds to thousands of rands. Even if publishers are able to do typesetting, layout, design and proofreading, the printing of a book can still be a financial stumbling block.

There is also the risk – especially in an unpredictable and fickle reading market – that the book will not sell, and thus publishers will battle to recover the production costs, never mind make a profit.

It is for this reason that many independent publishers, who do not have the same ready access to capital as commercial publishers, strive to obtain funding for their publications. Not only does funding assist their being able to meet the financial requirements of producing a book, but it can also remove, or at least minimise, the risk of financial loss.

In fact, even large publishers these days are beginning to require funding, usually from the author, to publish certain books. This is not, however, to be confused with vanity publishing.

It goes without saying, however, that obtaining funding is not always an easy task. After all, no one is going to hand over a relatively huge sum of money to just anybody, and the number of funding bodies are usually limited, especially in South Africa. As a publisher, you will also be competing with other applicants and will have to strongly motivate why you should be a recipient.

In South Africa, the two main bodies that fund publications are the National Arts Council (http://www.nac.org.za/) and the Arts & Culture Trust of the President
(http://www.artsculturetrust.co.za/).

Funding bodies generally have criteria to be met, so check whether your project meets the criteria before applying. Funding bodies also usually issue grants once or twice a year, so be sure you submit your application before the deadline.

Application forms for funding can usually be mailed to you, collected from the fund’s offices, or downloaded from its website.

An application form will require information such as:

· Details of yourself, or the publishing body requiring the funding. Private individuals may be required to submit a personal CV
· Details of the project involved. It is best if the manuscript is ready for production; a book that has still to be written is not a solid possibility
· Details of previous projects completed and their success rates
· Details of previous funding obtained from the body or from other bodies
· Details of any previous applications for funding that were declined
· A detailed costing of the project. This will justify the amount of funding that you are applying for and prove that you have thought the production out carefully. It is also a reflection of your credibility and ability to complete the project. Most importantly, ensure that your costing is correct, taking additional costs, such as distribution and promotion, into account. You will not look too credible if you go back to the funder asking for more money because your calculations were incorrect
· About three quotes from printers and/or designers
· About three character references on your ability to carry out the project
· The social benefit of the project. In South Africa, this is becoming increasingly important, especially with the current emphasis on social investment and the need to develop a book reading culture


Depending on the nature of the publication involved, it may be possible to obtain sponsorship from a corporate’s social investment or marketing division. While corporates are more likely to sponsor a publication with a direct social benefit – such as a book on how to start up a small business and create jobs – one large corporate in South Africa has sponsored anthologies of short fiction.

In the case of corporate sponsorship, you will probably have to draw up your own proposal for funding and meet with the respective manager. The proposal should contain similar information to that stated above, but you will also need to show what benefit the corporate itself will derive from the project. After all, why should it spend, for example, R20 000 on your project, as opposed to placing an advert in a national newspaper?

If you go the corporate sponsorship route, it is also worthwhile to ensure your editorial independence is safeguarded – after all, the last thing you want is for your project to be effectively hijacked and turned into a purely marketing tool.

Should your application for funding or corporate sponsorship be successful, you may be disappointed to find that you have not received the full amount that you requested. This may result in your having to absorb some of the costs yourself or to seek additional funding from another body.

You will, of course, be required to sign a contract with the funding body, which will usually stipulate a deadline for the project to be completed. You will be required to acknowledge the funding assistance on the imprint page of your book (including the funding body’s logo, if required) and submit a small number of copies to its archives. Should the funding body’s conditions not be met, you will be in breach of contract and will be required to return the funds.

Sponsorship may also be obtained in the form of services such as free design, printing or the provision of paper. Again, this requires strong motivation, as the service providers will want to know what benefit they will derive from the project.

Also be aware that simply because you have received funding from a particular body once, it does not follow that you will automatically receive support from it again. And while your having been funded once does act as a reference, it does not mean that another funder will necessarily be generous towards you.

(Originally published as Dye Hard Press Newsletter 5)

Drawing 2

Sexy body, Mona Lisa

Drawing 1

On offer

We’ve at work watching a blue movie. The woman in the movie is middle-aged and looks a bit like Hillary Clinton. She is clearly bored with her young and energetic tattooed lover, and as the camera zooms in on her face we can tell she is trying to decide whether to get up and walk away or suddenly throw herself into it and enjoy the fuck of a lifetime. It’s like we’re sitting on a bus travelling through London, and while I have been distracted for a second or two, the old man sitting opposite has slipped you a note saying that he knows you, that he knows your father, that he’d like to buy you an ice-cream. I read the note and stare hard into his face but he just stares back with a typically confident big granddaddy grin. And as the bus slows down to a stop you ask me: do we make a break for it now or just go along with the old bugger?

Some tips on how to submit work to literary journals

At the moment there are several literary journals being published in South Africa, In print form alone, we have Botsotso, Chimurenga, Carapace, Kotaz, New Coin, New Contrast, Ons Klyntji and Timbila.

Most of these journals are produced by independent publishers and not by commercial operations with their own offices complete with administrative staff and in-house editors and designers. These journals are mainly produced from home on a part-time basis by people who have commitments to fulltime jobs, families, studies, and other bread-and-butter concerns.

Very often it is one person – the editor – who collects submitted material from a post box, goes through submissions, answers correspondence, makes the selection of material and oversees the production of the journal, if not also undertaking the layout and design. The editor also liases with printers, undertakes the promotion of the journal, and in some cases distributes to bookshops as well.

If you wish to submit material to local literary journals, it would be worthwhile to keep the above in mind. To assist the editor in being able to manage the amount of submissions, it would also be worthwhile to consider the following:

1. Before you send material to a literary journal, obtain a copy of it so you can get an idea of the sort and genre of material that it publishes. It would be a waste of time (and money) sending fiction to a journal that only publishes poetry, for instance. There is also little point in sending sexually explicit poems to a conservative or religious publication, or sending traditional-form poems to a journal that only publishes experimental works.

2.If you cannot find a copy of the journal in a bookshop, contact the publisher and ask to purchase a copy. Avoid asking for a freebee; you may be lucky and receive a free copy.

3. Find out the submission guidelines for the journal. If you are asked to send no more than eight poems, then do not send more than eight poems. If you send a 100-page manuscript it would not be treated with enthusiasm.

4. Do not submit previously published work. This is a bit of debated topic as some writers (and editors) feel that internet and print publishing should be treated separately, and so submitting work already published on the internet to a print journal is acceptable. Other editors are completely against this practice, feeling that it downplays the role of internet publishing. If you want to submit work that has already been published on a website, it would be best to first check the submission policy of the print journal. If you can’t get clarity on this, when you submit work to the print journal indicate what submissions have been previously published on the internet.

5. Do not make duplicated submissions by sending the same material to more than one journal.

6. Find out the preferred means of submitting material to the journal. Most journals will gladly accept electronically submitted material because manuscripts do not have to be retyped from a hard copy. However, if you are going to submit electronically, also make sure whether it is acceptable to send by email attachment or whether the editor would prefer the text to be cut and pasted into the body of the email. Most of us, whether editors or not, are naturally wary of opening attachments from unknown sources.

7. Also make sure that you send the material in a commonly used text-based program such as MS Word. Do not send them to the editor on programs such as PowerPoint. Make sure that you use a standard font that is easily readable.

8. Avoid ‘illustrating’ your submission with computer graphics unless it is essential to the text.

9. Whether you submit work electronically or by normal post, make sure that you include a short covering letter that includes your name and contact details. A postal address and (preferably) an email address should suffice. I doubt whether any editor is likely to call you on your cellphone to discuss your work, so there is little point in including a cellphone number.
If you send material by normal post, you should include an SASE. Many independent publishers cannot afford to incur the cost of returning manuscripts and if you do not send a SASE it is unlikely that your manuscript will be returned. Even if works is submitted electronically, some journals will only reply to writers whose work has been accepted.

10. If you do not hear from a journal to which you have submitted material, do not contact the editor to establish if your work has been accepted and, if so, when it will be published. As I said, independent publishers have many other responsibilities and it may take a while before you hear from them. I know this can be frustrating (I have gone through it myself) but it is fair to say that if you have not heard from a journal after six months, it is unlikely that your work has been accepted.

11. If you receive a reply stating that your work has been rejected, do not enter into correspondence with the editor unless invited to. Most importantly, do not complain about it. Accept the editor’s decision. Do not take the rejection personally; it is only the editor’s opinion. If you are provided with feedback on why it was rejected, and receive suggestions on how to improve your work, consider the feedback. You do not have to agree with it, but at least consider it.

12. If your work is accepted by a journal for one issue, do not assume that all further submissions by yourself will be immediately accepted.

As a writer myself, I am aware of the frustrations that writers experience when submitting work to journals, but by adhering to the above guidelines, writers can help the production of a journal to run more quickly and more smoothly. When an independent publisher is faced with producing a journal that involves extremely time-consuming administration, there is a possibility that they may choose to discontinue publishing the journal, resulting in fewer publishing opportunities for writers.

(Originally published as Dye Hard Press Newsletter 9)

Sun and Rain

Check out Joop Bersee's latest online collection Sun and Rain. Consisting of about 70 poems, the collection ranges in subject matter from Baby Jordan, Telly Savalas, John Lennon, Dylan Thomas and Goethe, to dogs, cats and undertakers, as well as visiting museums or sitting in hospital waiting rooms.

One of my favourites is the following:

Art lesson number one

Some say that the paintings
by Willem de Kooning are

absolutely rubbish, trash.
That you can turn them 90

degrees, 180 degrees, 270
degrees and still they don't

make any sense.
Then I tell them: look out

of the window.
Does that make any sense?

Velvet

Velvet is a new film by Aryan Kaganof based on my cut-up prose sequence April in the Moon-Sun. The film traces the progress from nothingness to the creation of the word, and from the word the creation of the image - the manifestation of Dirty Girl.
With Taylor Rain as Dirty Girl. Music by Matmos. 11 minutes, 32 seconds.

Born free

Independent literary publishing has existed in South Africa for decades, and has in the past been manifest mainly in the production of literary journals such as The Purple Renoster and Ophir in the 1960-1970s and Staffrider in the 1980s. Until about 1994, independent publishers were faced with two main challenges – access to the huge amounts of capital required for conventional production and printing, and government censorship.... Read more here

Local heroes fight back

Back in 1984, a year after I arrived in South Africa, I was approached by some students conducting research on opinions about South African writing, to which I gave the answer: "It's awful!" I can no longer recall how I came to form that opinion, but for many years there has been a kind of cultural snobbery in South Africa that has relegated local writing to the inferior, mediocre and not-as-good-as-overseas categories. Read more here

No, Who

The vanity publishing route - is it worth it?

These days, many authors, new and established, experience frustration at trying to get manuscripts published by commercial publishers – sometimes they are lucky if the publisher even gets to the basic stage of reading their work. It is perhaps due to this situation that some authors – aided by digital publishing, which has made book production a good deal cheaper – have published their books themselves.

There is, however, a third option – vanity publishing. A vanity press offers to publish a book provided the production costs are financed by the author. These production costs will, however, include a built-in profit for the press, thus guaranteeing an income irrespective of book sales. After all, unlike genuine publishers, vanity presses do not undertake the promotion, marketing or distribution of books that they produce – this is left to the author.

The press also usually promises professional editorial assistance and advice, and the book – the number of copies of which is determined by the amount that the author is able to pay – is delivered to the author within the relatively short period of a couple of months or so.

In certain circumstances, such a scenario is not necessarily bad in itself. For example: your favourite hobby is writing poems about your pet cat. The end of the year is approaching and you feel that an excellent idea for a Christmas present would be to collect your poems, publish about 20 copies of them through a vanity press, and circulate them privately as presents to family and friends. In this instance, no harm is done.

However, the usual situation involving vanity presses can prove quite damaging. A new author produces a novel that may not be of any literary merit. But with a vanity press, the sole qualification for publication is the ability to pay – whether the book is good or bad. Authors of bad literary works may, therefore, be misled into believing they have a saleable masterpiece on their hands due simply to the fact that someone is willing to publish it – even if at a cost.

While some vanity presses are upfront about the requirement for payment and will provide quotes prior to the signing of the contract, there are some that will hide the payment factor among a series of clauses and conditions, or while not actually stipulating that the production will have to be paid for, will state that a ‘consultation fee’ will be charged – the amount of which authors will only discover after they have legally bound themselves to the contract.

Despite promises, editorial consultation is generally poor or nonexistent. I have known of cases where even author’s corrections have been ignored. The print and paper quality may be poor, the cover design and colour reproduction inferior, and the binding weak. I recently saw a vanity published book with print on some pages so faint that it was difficult to read, the edges of the book had been trimmed skew, and the spine was falling apart – a matter of months after delivery to the author.

But even if the production is of acceptable quality, authors may encounter difficulty when they try to market and distribute the book. Vanity presses generally lack credibility among distribution agents, book editors, and bookstores; the reason being that it is known that the book would have been published solely on the basis of ability to pay and not on merit. Authors may, therefore, be sitting with 500 copies of a book that no one is willing to promote or buy, while the vanity press has already made its profit.

For some time it has been the payment factor – even if stated upfront – that has been the controversial aspect in vanity publishing. But due to the fact that more and more publications these days, especially in South Africa, are funded, wholly or in part, I do not regard the request for payment to be an issue in itself.

If the production of a book is funded and published by a genuine publisher, that book will probably have literary merit, plus the publisher will be both able and willing to provide the author with the services that a publisher should be able to – which is not the case with vanity presses. Furthermore, a genuine publisher has an interest in producing a quality product to ensure sales revenue, while a vanity press – which has already secured its profit upfront – has no such incentive.

Should you approach, or be approached by, a publisher whom you have never heard of, or know little about, it is worthwhile to:

· Establish whether the publisher has a website and check it out. Study the wording carefully to ascertain whether it may be a vanity publisher
· Find out what titles the publisher has produced and try to locate copies. If you are successful, study the quality of production and try to get a grasp of the literary merit of the titles
· Find out if the major bookstores store these titles; if not, phone the respective purchasing managers to find out if they have heard of the publisher, and if so, what they know of the business
· If you receive a contract from the publisher, study it carefully to ascertain whether there are any references to the possibility that you may be required to pay towards the production of the book. If so, query them with the publisher. As an independent publisher myself, I can appreciate a publisher’s reluctance to foot the bill for unwarranted costs such as excessive author’s corrections at final proof stage, so such clauses may not necessarily be an indication that you are dealing with a vanity press
· Check in the contract if the publisher does not undertake, or guarantee to undertake, promotion or distribution. Remember that a genuine publisher makes its income through the sale of books, so if a so-called publisher does not undertake promotion and distribution, this begs the obvious question of how the business is earning its money. If there is no reference in the contract to promotion or distribution, query it with the publisher and get a written commitment to these tasks

Should you choose to go the vanity press route, then fine. As I have said, some vanity press productions are of an acceptable quality, though promotion and distribution may still present a problem. It depends on what your expectations and requirements are. But in the age of digital publishing, I consider vanity presses to be unnecessary. Author can, given a bit of learning and time, publish their own work – the production of which they can oversee themselves – at substantially reduced costs.

(This piece was originally published as Dye Hard Press Newsletter 3)

Dancing on the edge of a volcano - Val Sing

Published by Dye Hard Press in 1996 (out of print).

All nine South African provinces spend only 25% of library grant

A task team should investigate why all nine provinces had spent less than 25% of the R180m first tranche of a R1bn grant Finance Minister Trevor Manuel allocated to public libraries last year, the Democratic Alliance (DA) said yesterday. Read more here

So Why Compromise?