The Penguin Blog

Around the World in 80 Books: the sixth leg

Last night, my visiting mother raised a perfect French brow and asked me, "Zo... you 'ave not put up a blerg* since June, non?"** I realised, with horror, that she was right, and set out immediately to rectify this terrible fact. Since there's only fifty-six-ish days left to complete my journey around the world, I reasoned that enough procrastination was enough, and it was time to dust off my passport and leave Austria for less... sadomasochistic climes.

So here I am, in merry, merry Germany!

Sixth stop: Germany

Book: The Complete Tales, by The Brothers Grimm

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This is a wonderful book, for hundreds of reasons that have doubtless been written about almost exhaustively by better men than I. But reading to myself from the big hardback marbled edition that I had as a child, and reading the stories aloud to my daughter, I was struck again by the bleakness and warmth, the completeness and the sketchiness, the horror and the comedy of each story. I will always, always love the many variations of the brothers turned into birds with only their youngest sibling to save them, or the wisdom of the girls who defeat witches to save their lover, or the brave young women who live as bears to avoid the cruelty and idiocy of their families (believe me, if bears were in my neighbourhood, I would have been on that bearskin train many, many times over the years). I love that the moon is cold and smells 'manflesh' when approached, or that the stars sit kindly on little stools; I love that a mouse, a bird and a sausage set up house together (very successfully, I'll have you know); I love that being the last-born tended to mean either a glorious long life or a brutal early death (not that death meant the end of communication with the living, of course, especially not if you were a headless infant). I'm still delighted by the imagination of these tales, that almost entirely formed my world view and still influence my reading tastes.

Conclusions as a traveller:

Don't marry a woman who's already been married. Sorry. Or at the very least, keep her away from your kids. Orrrr... take your children to the local palace? They'll probably fare pretty well with the king (as long as he doesn't have a mean servant). Oh, and if an old lady asks for your help, do it. She'll almost certainly give you a table that's always full of food/a donkey that vomits gold/a dress made of stars. Either that or she'll try to eat you.

 

Sam the Copywriter

*blerg = French for 'blog'

**accent may owe more to 'Allo 'Allo than actual speaking mannerisms

A morning in the woods: diary of an editor

It’s been years since I set my alarm for 4.30 am – I’ll do anything to avoid easyJet or any other such ungodly calls upon my time – but on Monday I was going off into the forest to see the deer, and being up before the sun was part of the deal.  So I set off in what I can only call the very, very dark and joined my guide for the day, Colin Elford, and his two dogs.

I first met Colin, a forest ranger, when he’d come on one of his very rare trips to London.  We’re publishing his diary of a year in the woods – aptly named A YEAR IN THE WOODS: DIARY OF A FOREST RANGER – so we had thought he might like to come and meet us in our natural habitat – which clearly wasn’t his.  He wore his special-occasion suit and looked distinctly as if he wasn’t from these parts.  And now here he was, looking much more himself, with his rifle slung over the shoulder (in case he came across an injured deer) and his dogs around his ankles. Meanwhile I clearly looked as out of place as he’d done in his suit, because there was a swift assessment of the situation and suddenly there I was – and here I am in the accompanying picture – dressed in one of Colin’s camouflage coats and a balaclava knitted by his mother.

And so we were kitted out and ready.  Leaving the vehicle and dogs behind we headed into the very depths of the forest, up a ladder and into a high seat.  We watched and we listened, and occasionally we’d see something and occasionally we’d hear something – and the whole thing was quite wonderful, with various creatures swooping, scurrying or trotting past. There were tawny owls, a woodcock, crossbills, pheasants, a wren, and of course the deer.  And added to all this was the half-pig, half-lion soundtrack of a rutting fallow buck (for those who aren’t familiar with the word ‘rutting’, it means, according to my dictionary ‘in a state of readiness to copulate’).  We didn’t see the rutter in question from the high seat, but we did see what looked like one of the objects of his affections.  She looked a little traumatised by the experience – as Colin put it, the males don’t bother with wining and dining – and she was almost licking her wounds as she came past.

The sun was almost up by now (but I was living the real thing, remember, and not this speeded-up version of events, so two whole hours had passed), and it was time to descend from the high seat and adjust to life on the ground.  We threaded through trees, heard more deer noises, examined deer prints in the mud, smelt where they’d left their mark, and spotted more deer ears above the undergrowth.  By this time I was feeling quite at home, with the usual accessories of my life left far behind – so much so, in fact, that when Colin said my name it sounded strange to me – and it wasn’t until the mention of food that I was very much back in my body and to earth as I usually know it.

So off with the camouflage coat and balaclava, and back for a hearty breakfast.  And now I’m back at my desk with nothing but some strange photographs to prove I was really there.

Juliette Mitchell,
Editor, Hamish Hamilton

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In praise of independent bookshops

Don’t tell anyone I work with but I don’t actually buy that many books. I used to, when I worked in Waterstone’s, as I a) was constantly surrounded by lots I wanted, b) had a staff discount, and, most crucially of all, c) couldn’t get them for free like I can often do now. 

When I do buy books, though, I like to try and do it from an independent. Yes, it’s more expensive as you usually pay full price but I find the experience quite edifying, mainly for the fact that it feels like everyone else in the transaction is getting maximum benefit: writer, publisher and, of course and perhaps most importantly, the bookseller. But to a few people I’ve told this to, including many friends, it seems a confusing choice: apart from 

feeling like a good egg/self-important, what do I get out of it? Call me starry-eyed but nothing less than a lovely, life-affirming experience, an experience typified by two brilliant independent bookshops in Bath: Topping & Co and Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights. I visited them both with Nick Hornby recently, who read at Topping, and they both manage to be utterly charming yet completely different. Topping does fantastic events and the shop is full-to-bursting with signed first editions; they think of themselves as being a ‘year-round literary festival’ and Nick’s event, in the shop itself, was gloriously old-fashioned: people peering out from behind bookshelves, crammed into corners and surrounded by books of all kinds. Between listening to Nick read I found myself browsing the shelves and making mental notes of books I wanted.

Mr B’s takes the idea of browsing and shopping in comfort to a whole new level for bookshops. They have a ‘reading booth’, within which are a comfy armchair, some biscuits and a ledge to hold your cup of tea. You shut the door and just sit there and read. Imagine! A man apparently shut his dog in there recently and couldn’t get it out, so I guess it’s not quite fool-proof. But they have also started what I think is a brilliant initiative. It’s called a Reading Spa: for £55 a person gets an hour of undivided attention from one of their extremely nice and knowledgeable booksellers. You sit and have tea and cake and talk about what you like, what you don’t like; they talk about what’s come out recently, what’s selling well. Based on this, they then go away and come back with a pile of books. £40 of that £55 goes towards these books, plus of course any extra you want to spend. So far they’re doing at least one a week and one chap spent an extra £400 a couple of weeks ago.

Great independents don’t exist everywhere, of course, and you can’t always get to one, but if you do happen to have one near you, I urge you to go in and have a browse. It’s the best atmosphere for book-buying, in my opinion.

Do you have a favourite independent bookshop? Why don’t you write them a little puff-piece in the comments below and provide a link to their website? They’ll thank you for it, and you’ll sleep well because of it.

Joe The Publicist

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Penguin Press Design blog Autumn '09

With the latest stress of dates and deadlines passed there is just time to bring the second round up of new Penguin Press covers, this time looking at the pick of covers being published this Autumn 2009. So all these books are just out in the shops or will be imminently.

There's been a few covers to get excited about this month, starting with Great Ideas Vol. IV.  Again, David Pearson and his merry team, Phil Baines, Catherine Dixon and Alistair Hall, have run riot over these covers producing another diverse, irresistible and often beautiful set of designs, many are saying the best yet. I've picked out five of my faves here, below, but you can see them all here.

    



And some very pleasant papery close ups:

 
We're also publishing four new books in a series called Great Stars, written by the eminent film guru David Thomson, each focusing on the lives of movie idols from the golden age of Hollywood. These cool graphic covers based on movie theatre marquees were designed in-house by Stefanie Posavec.

   

Stefanie has also been extremely busy these last few months working with Scott Schuman, also known as The Sartorialist, putting together a chic little Penguin book of the same name, featuring some of the photographic and stylistic highlights of his fashion blog so far. Last month saw Scott sign over 600 copies at the book's lively launch at Liberty.

 

There is also a very sharp collectors edition of The Sartorialist:

 

The pick of other Penguin Press paperback covers for Autumn ‘09 are:

The Penguin History of Modern Russia (design in-house by Richard Green)

 

The Candy Machine (design in-house by Richard Green)

And from our latest Allen Lane hardbacks:

1939: Countdown to War (design in-house by Coralie Bickford-Smith)

Justice (design in-house by Stefanie Posavec)

A couple of the coolest looking books new to the Modern Classics collection:

  

A lovely cover for Vitruvius, at last in Penguin Classics, and The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse:

   


Thanks to Samantha Johnson and Isabelle de Cat for the Classics picture selections.

A delicious round of illustrations by Richard Green on the cute little hardback, The Old Dog and Duck, published on our Particular Books imprint:

And, penultimately, we have the paperback cover for Deyan Sudjic's The Language of Things, designed by yours truly.

Deyan is someone living his very life in the golden section, surrounded daily by the beautifully crafted and elegantly formed (and that’s just the staff at the Design Museum, boom boom) so when it comes to designing his covers the stops have to be pulled way out.

And now, really lastly, we have put together this box of 100 postcards, called Postcards from Penguin, featuring Penguin covers from the past.

In the selection are some of the very first Penguin covers with their broad colour bands and charming typography. There are also many postcards that feature illustrated book covers and these were simply chosen for their irresistible charisma, like the lovely 60s paintings by Alan Aldridge on The Company She Keeps and There Must Be a Pony; the seismic David Pelham illustration for A Clockwork Orange; the perceptively light touch of Derek Birdsall on the covers for Chosen Words or Kiss Kiss; or the utterly 'Penguin' crime covers with illustrations by Romek Marber on books such as The Case of the Dangerous Dowager or The Case of the Howling Dog. And with a few surprises too.

That rounds up the pick of Penguin Press covers Autumn 2009.

Jim Stoddart
Art Director, Penguin Press

Hitchcon'09

It's nearly the end of September, and there's something seriously stirring in the Galaxy. The countdown (10 days, 12 hours, 42 minutes) is, well, still counting down, towards the much anticipated publication of 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Part Six of Three...And Another Thing' by Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer, published to mark the 30th anniversary of the publication of the Douglas Adams' first book. 

And to celebrate publication of quite possibly the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor (probably), a red hot team of Penguins from the unfashionable end of the Penguin corridor, are currently putting the final touches to Hitchcon '09, a day of events celebrating all things Hitch at the Royal Festival Hall on the 11th October.

Special guests will include Clive Anderson, Andrew Sachs, Simon Jones, Harry Shearer, Dirk Maggs, Hotblack Desiato (depending on his ongoing tax situation) and the original Hitchhiker cast. Not a Vogon poet in sight. And at 11.30am on the Southbank we're assembling the largest group of dressing-gown-wearing Hitchhiker's fans ever in the whole world for a photocall, and possibly for some mattress racing afterwards ...

Sadly there hasn't been enough contact with silver foil, glue, glitter and buckets of jewelled crabs to prepare for Hitchcon for my liking, but I'm still hopeful that one of these days my to do list will read (in big friendly letters) 'To Do Today Please and Quickly: Cover the Festival Hall and the length of the South Bank with tea and Chesterfield sofas'. No tea and sofas so far, but we have been handstitching dozens of dressing gowns, plenty of branded towels, and the odd pair of slippers (some of that may or may not be true) and I can now claim a nearly unrivalled office competence with a needle and thread.

It feels like everyone's gone completely bonkers over this book and for Hitchhiker's. And from all parts of the galaxy to boot, not just the literary bits. Fritz Hansen, super famous Danish furniture designer, most famous for his iconic Egg chair has created 42 individually numbered chairs, featuring a unique embroidered exploding earth on the back, and Eoin will be carrying one as hand luggage across the country for the book signing tour.

Multi-platinum selling Irish band The Blizzards have recorded 'And Another Thing', a single inspired by the book, which will be released in October. And the band will be very thrillingly appearing at Hitchcon alongside Eoin on stage. Penguin also put out a call to find the Greatest Hitchhiker Fans in the Galaxy in 42 seconds, and, after many brilliant competition entries - this one has to take the biscuit, surely? He jumps into an actual freezing Swedish lake in September! That's one hoopy frood.

Eoin will be touring all over the country transported in a Bistromath spaceship and carrying the aforementioned Egg chair across his back, signing copies of 'And Another Thing...' talking about the book, and possibly sharing God's Final Message to His Creation. We couldn't fit in a visit to the Maximegalon University, but he will be appearing at Cambridge University on the 14th October instead, alongside visits to Glasgow, Cheltenham, Birmingham, Manchester and Forbidden Planet in London.

And after all of this excitement our little team of red hot Penguins from the unfashionable end of the Penguin corridor, will probably enter something resembling that much discussed long dark tea time of the soul ...

Publicist Katya

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Classic blog post

Put your hands up if you remember Alan the Copywriter, one time inhabitant of these shores.

I thought so.

Well, it turns out that he also remembers you. Yes, that includes you slouching at the back. Pay attention there.

Anyway, Alan did not a few posts on this here blog about some of the rather cool designs coming out of Penguin Press last year. One of the highlights was an innovative interview he did with designer and damn good egg Coralie Bickford-Smith. This made a lot of people very envious. Of Coralie; of Alan; of smart and sexy people having smart and sexy fun.

What do you mean: don't remember, sir? Got eyes, haven't you? Then why don't you refresh your memory by taking a good look at this. 

 

Where was I?

Oh yes. Alan. He's not been quiet in his absence. He has his own blog now - smartysexypants that he is, he appears to have set it up all by himself. It's very cool and called Greater Than Or Equal To. And to prove that he still has his fingers on the publishing pulse he's just done a new interview with Coralie about her wonderful new designs for some new Penguin hardback classics.

New, you hear. It's all brand, spanking new.

So why not get over there and see what Alan and Coralie have got to say to each other. Poke around. Go through Alan's drawers. Criticise his choice of wallpaper. Get the keys to his liquor cabinet and go get good and drunk.

Smart and sexy don't even begin to describe the fun you'll have.

Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter

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Penguin Press Design July '09*

It's been mentioned once or twice that there should be more about book covers on this blog and so this is the first in an attempt to bring monthly highlights of new cover designs from the Penguin Press part of Penguin.

But this will be a bit of a bloated blog entry because before we get onto July's choice of brand new covers this would be a great opportunity to answer another frequently asked question: ‘how does it all happen then, covers and that?’

Well, in the Penguin Press Art Dpt we have 5 in-house designers (including myself) and 2 people working on sourcing images, but we also tap into a huge range of freelance creatives too. This is in order to tackle between 30-50 new covers per month.

The birth of a book cover starts a cosily maternal nine months before publication. Every book we publish is championed by a Commissioning Editor or Publisher. At the very beginning of the process that editor will raise the new title at a weekly cover meeting where the design brief for the cover will be discussed. We thrash out the what is exciting about the book, significant thrusts, the author's previous, the potential readership and any unique aspects. It works best when there is a lot of free-association as well as factual details. As Art Director I scribble down as many key points as seem to offer inspiration. Then we take the brief and gestate. Figuring out a course of action is not always straight forward, but reading what is available (finished chapters, intruductions) helps incredibly.

Our Picture Editor, Samantha Johnson, also attends the initial cover brieing meeting and she and I discuss the potential direction of each cover and whether we need some picture research or specific image commissioning to be done.

Then I'll figure out a suitable designer to work on each book. We'll also have a departmental run through of the cover briefs and often one of the designers will particularly want to work on a specific book or throw in an idea or two. Designers tend to be very creative with solutions, and they'll pitch visuals using both recommended images and images they've sourced or created themslves. But I will always be trying to get them to convey the 'spark' of the book that was so thoroughly established in the original brief.

Ideally, and with all things in place, we could have up to 3 months to work up a cover. But in reality this is unlikely.  We're often extremely busy with existing projects from previous months, and in-house designers will juggle half a dozen covers at a time.

Each cover may face a wide range of hurdles and conflicting opinions, his is the very nature of book covers. Good designers tend to be very focussed and resiliant, and the value of a good sense of humour cannot be underestimated. As with most design jobs there is a balance of concept, craftsmanship and time dexterity required. Any number of changes to the brief may occur even once the design is finished. But in Penfuin Press it is widely appreciated that the more a cover is 'tweaked' by a committee the less chance there is of retaining that original spark that we all know helps a book stand out in a world where thousands of books are vying for attention.

When a number of honed front cover visuals are ready I wiil take them back to the cover meeting and recommend one for approval. If others in the meeting concur, the designer will finish off any details or amends and prepare the back cover and spine artwork. We'll then circulate the artwork for sign-off from everyone involved.

At this point we've got to six months before publication and we have an important deadline to send that particular month's cover artwork to the printers for wet-proofing. The proofs are used by Penguin's sales teams to help win orders for each book from shops and outlets. We'll also re-circulate the proofs to key people at Penguin forchecking and signing off one more time. In the Art Dpt we also check proofs for colour, legibility, typos and ensure all picture rights are cleared.

Then at around 3 months before publication there is another big deadline where we send the final cross-checked signed-off cover to the printers to become a book.

And that's that. Easy as ABC.

I can go through a couple of our July publications to help illustrate it all.

Why Is Q Always Followed By U is one of the first books to be published on our new Particular Books imprint. It's a book about language quirks by linguistic expert Michael Quinion and the cover design process was about as straight forward as it gets.

I think I made this sketch soon after the cover briefing meeting:

Presented this concept at a cover meeting soon after for general concept before commissioning:

Commissioned illustrator Kate Forrester who did this lively interpretation:

This is the jacket we proofed:

And this is the final jacket we printed, with amended subtitle and added quotes:

If only they were all as simple as that.

Another July example is the jacket for The Junior Officers' Reading Club. This is a unique book written by Patrick Hennessey, an active soldier on duty with his regiment in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hennessey describes life in a modern army and our early discussions about the cover worked around the idea of showing the solace and escapism (or lack of) a book brings in tense surroundings. Hennessey even had a great range of photos he had taken himself and one particular shot of him at rest with some of his squadron seemed to sum up much of the book quite concisely. Hennessey is pictured reading while his colleagues sleep, weapons piled up around them:

 

This is the initial range of in-house visuals working with this photo. Here the designer tries a few different approaches, some too booky, and some possibly better for a paperback rather than a hardback:

This was the the front cover of the jacket we proofed:

But having lived with this cover for a couple of months there was a general feeling emerging at Penguin that this cover was possibly to journalistic and didn't convey some of the more literary qualities of the book. So I asked freelance desiger David Wardle to come up with some new ideas, and this one leapt out as a great front cover, and this is now the final jacket, printed and in the shops just a few weeks later. The book is selling very well:

Now let's have a look at some of the new Penguin Press book covers born July 2009.

Firstly, on the Allen Lane hardback non-fiction imprint:

In Search of Civilization (design in-house by Stafanie Posavec)

Good Value (design Jamie Keenan)

Also on our Particular Books imprint:

The Country Alphabet (cover illustration by Mark Thomas)

Onto the pick of this month's Penguin Press Paperbacks:

Outliers (design in-house by Stefanie Posavec)

Lewis Carroll in Numberland (design David Mann, who was in-house when this was put together)

Traffic (design in-house by Richard Green)

What Next? (photography by Suki Dhanda)

The Secret Life of Birds (Illustration by Delphine Lebourgois)

The Money Machine (design by YES)

And the pick of new/refreshed Penguin Classics are here too:

The Prince (design in-house by Coralie Bickford-Smith)

The latest in our refreshed Orwell fiction Modern Classics (some already out), with illustrations by Marion Deuchars:

And the latest Susan Sontag Modern Classics (reportage for her non-fiction, paintings for her fiction):

And lastly for this month. A new cover for Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, with new illustration by Stephen Rothwell:

And that rounds up July’s pick of the month. Next month we can bring you images of the iminent publication of the next Great Ideas series.

Jim Stoddart
Art Director, Penguin Press

* Yes, I know it is late August. We're sorry.

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Publicity 2.0, or Online Book PR, or 'Blog me the money!'

Almost as soon as I thought of the subject matter for this blog I began to worry about what I like to think of as my ‘online rep’.  ‘Blogging’, one of our work experience children tells me, has been around for some time now (it’s something to do with the interweb, FYI) and there are a few out there who write (the verb is ‘blog’, weirdly) about literature.  Now, I use email as much as the next person, and I even have a Twitter account (look mum, look at all those followers! Mwhahahaha…) but blow me down if it doesn’t seem like I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants all this time… I’m a bit worried I’ll seem like a techno dinosaur (although that would be cool).

Of course (wait for it), I’m exaggerating a bit and I do deal with a number of literary blogs and bloggers.  I’ve even commented on a few.  And I’m pretty honest about nailing my Penguin colours to the mast when I do it.  Honesty and integrity, it appears to me, are watch-words of literary blogging, even when I don’t necessarily agree with a review or a point or anything else or don’tmakemecomeoverthereandstartsomething.  Sometimes I just can’t help myself and I have to stick my oar in.  But blogs are all about discussion, at their best, and people need to feel free to say what they want and also have an idea who they’re saying it to, hence me putting my hand up and saying “I work at Penguin, guv.”

The problem with online PR is that, it’s perhaps fair to say, there’s been a certain amount of scepticism in the publishing world as to the merits and affects of book blogs, and even the reasons behind them.  In my time emails have gone round the publishing houses warning of someone purporting to be from a print publication that is, in fact, fake, just to get free books, either to read or to sell.  Blogs caused suspicion because even if someone linked through to one that clearly existed, it could be a fairly ad hoc enterprise, one that potentially took little effort on the part of the blogger to circulate or even write when compared to the book-y rewards they were receiving.  It’s a quid pro quo agreement, sending review copies out, albeit a flexible one.

Two things have caused me and I’m sure many others to have a re-think.  Firstly, the simple fact that there’s now less space in the traditional outlets, such as newspapers, magazines, radio, etc, and every book publicist in London is competing for it.  It’s always the hardest part of the job, convincing someone that they should consider, look at, perhaps read and, if you’re lucky, cover a book and there’s less room now than there used to be, for various reasons.  So as publicists, we have to look beyond where we’ve usually aimed for coverage.

(Who’s this guy with Joe the Publicist?)

The second reason is the obvious increase in the number of serious, quality book bloggers and sites out there.  Blogs such as ReadySteadyBook, Dovegreyreader Scribbles, Untitled Books or Asylum have clear aims in mind, an important ethical and aesthetic approach to their book coverage and, most importantly and informing all of this, a passion for books that means they take it very seriously and do it, well, properly.  They’re not after any free copy they can get their hands on and won’t just review a book well, or even at all, because they’ve been sent it. 

An interesting discussion appeared on Twitter recently about the effect of book blogging and online discussion.  While it remains hard to judge what sales come directly from a blog, from a particular online review or comment, or whether one blog is ‘better’ or more effective than another, the phrase that keeps coming to my mind is word of mouth.  That phrase is mentioned a few times in the Twitter discussion and it seems to be mentioned, at least indirectly, in online forums.  People who interact with book sites do it more and more frequently; relationships and trust builds up; you get to know other peoples’ tastes and they get to know yours; and it’s no longer a closed circle for a certain type of person.  In short, getting a review on a widely-read blog gets the book you’re working on talked about somewhere, and that is far, far better than silence.  As publishers that’s essentially what we’re trying to do.  Yes, we need to make money but we’ll never do that if no one is talking about our books.  You may not be able to measure sales from them 100% but neither can you do that with a lead review in Sunday Times Culture.

So I’m going to carry on with my mission of finding out more about the sites and bloggers I already work with and do my best to cast my net a little wider and discover more.  I’m hoping to find out what they like, what they read, what they look for from books, and publishers, and I think I’ll learn a lot from it.  As publicists, and as publishers, we need to look beyond what we’ve always seen as a benchmark for a publicity campaign and see what we can do to push ourselves, and our books, a little further.

For your reading pleasure (you need something to help you get over how serious the above got, right?) here are five literary blogs I’ve discovered and enjoyed recently:

http://robaroundbooks.com/  

http://www.thefictiondesk.com/

http://kimbofo.typepad.com/readingmatters/

http://www.booklit.com/blog/

http://www.acommonreader.org.uk/

 

Joe, Literary Publicity (@Joethepublicist – I know, I know)

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Can we be of service?

As Penguin's Digital Publisher, I've had any number of conversations over the last few years with traditional book editors where I've tried to convince them that we're in 'the content business' rather than 'the book business'. I've realised, as I eat my lunch alone, that in a company full of book-lovers these editors don't really want to think of themselves as content producers, however I dress it up in sexy new-media jargon. Or, perhaps, because of the new-media jargon.

And as the debate about the value and price of digital content rages on, I'm testing out a new mantra on my suspicious colleagues; services not content. The idea, ill-formed as it is in my head, is that while we might continue find it a challenge to get consumers to pay for digital content, we might be able to use our skills, expertise and experience to create services that people will pay for. Services are what we do for writers, so perhaps there might be services we can create for readers. (note - I'm not the only person thinking along these lines - it's worth having a look at Bookseer and Bkkeeper, both from James Bridle and HarperCollins' BookArmy initiative). 

Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and so I'm happy to be launching our first 'service' - a suite of storymaking tools for children. At We Make Stories children (of all ages, though the site is aimed at 6-11 year olds) can create, print and share a variety of story forms. They can make pop-up stories, customise audiobooks, design their own comics, produce exciting treasure maps and develop a variety of entertaining adventures.

So we'll soon find out whether there is an audience for paid-for* services from publishers and whether, as well as publishing books that people want to read, we can develop services that people will find useful and entertaining. Otherwise, I guess I'll be looking for a new mantra before too long.

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

*We Make Stories isn't free though it is very reasonably priced - and we've got free memberships for the first five people who leave a comment below

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Special Guest Post: Philip O'Ceallaigh on inspiring short stories

We asked author Philip O'Ceallaigh what his favourite or most inspiring short stories were.
This is what he said:

Hard to choose a favourite Hemingway story, but it would have to be from his first collection, In Our Time, and most days I’d go for Big Two-hearted River. It’s a strange story, because nothing much happens. In it, a man walks into the wilderness to find a good place to fish. It describes the places he walks through, the heat of the day, the light through the pines, the weight of the pack on his back, how he made his camp, and the fishing itself. Once in one of my own stories I described a man reading a story, immersed, while in a busy street of a crowded city. I didn’t name the story, but I was imagining him Big Two-Hearted River, and registering my own reaction to what Hemingway had achieved:

“What was beautiful about the story was… a sensual pleasure, in each of the things he saw and did. …It was a feeling for beauty that the writer of the story possessed. In the words he chose, in his intention to observe and report the world, there was something very pure and solitary. And when you followed the words and saw the things as the man walked and camped and fished, you too felt that the world was once again something new to be seen and noticed and felt.”

Hemingway describes the natural world so that you feel it, but it is his ability to describe conflict that critics remark more often. Like Isaac Babel, he describes terrible things without seeming to register any writerly distress. Frank O’Connor in The Lonely Voice, his classic study the short story form, claimed that what the two men had in common was the ‘romaniticism of violence,’ presumably because they did not explicitly condemn the events they described.

My favourite Babel stories are those describing his boyhood in the ghetto of Odessa in Tsarist times. The Story of My Dovecot describes the young Babel’s attempts to be an exemplery student, to gain admission to education in the face of an ant-Jewish quota system. He gets his exams on the same day a Cossack pogrom tears through the ghetto. A lesson on the power of the pen, perhaps. (Babel was executed during the Stalinist purges. He had given up writing, but at that point even a writer’s silence was a crime.) Other Babel stories I love are In the Basement (“I was a deceitful boy. That was the result of reading…”) and Guy de Maupassant, where he goes from a romantic appreciation of the writer’s spirit to a knowledge of the facts of his terrible life of illness and madness (“I was brushed by a foreboding of truth.”)

O’Connor got it wrong. Babel did not romanticise violence. He just knew it was there.

Chekhov is another kind of artist. His prose never calls attention to itself. It is measured and understated. One of my favourites is simply entitled My Life, the leisurely tale of a young provincial of good family who innocently decides to earn his living by manual labour. Interestingly, My Life is on the long side, and you sense that arbitrary definitions of form do not trouble the author. The story takes as long as it takes. These days his publisher would tell him to pump some air in it so they could put it out as a novel.

Hard to choose from among such Bukowski classics as Six Inches, All the Pussy We Want and The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, California. In the latter, two winos steal a corpse. It turns out to be the best date they’ve had in quite some time. They have epiphanies such as “she can’t say NO!” and “Everything is so sad – that we live all our lives as idiots and then finally die.” In the drunk exhausted dawn they push her out to sea, and among the seaweed and the waves, with her hair moving in the current, she becomes a mermaid.

I like Bukowski because he turns the junk of life into art. And that his style is so delightfully un-literary, anti-literary. He does stuff you shouldn’t do, says what doesn’t get said, seems less to be courting a readership than spitting in its collective eye. And yet he’s a marvelously efficient, concise writer. His best poetry works in the same way as his stories, as compact punchy narratives, and so many episodes from his novels could stand alone as stories too.

What defines a short story? Sometimes they’re not even all that short. Other times they’re poems. About all you can say about them is they are self contained, that they work. Sometimes they’re even bits of something else that doesn’t really work: I’m thinking of a novel I’ve just read by Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch. Ridiculous novel. But I’d throw chapters 23 or 28 in there among my favourite short stories.  

Philip O'Ceallaigh

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Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing reportabuse@penguin.co.uk

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