This is the first in a new series called Ten Questions in which IS&T will be talking to small presses.  Here, Director of Salt Publishing  Chris Hamilton-Emery supplies the answers.

Ten Questions

 

 

Name: Salt

DOB: 2000

Hometown: Perth, Australia

 

1. Who is Salt?

 

Salt’s board consists of Linda Bennett, Chris
Hamilton-Emery, Jen Hamilton-Emery and John Skelton. In the Cambridge sales
office there are Sarah-Jayne Johnson and Lee Smith as well as a range of
interns from Anglia Ruskin University, currently James Miller and Alexandra
Thurman. Overseas we have Janet McAdams and her Earthworks team of editors,
that includes Katherine Hedeen, Gordon Henry Jr and Víctor Rodríguez-Núñez. In
Australia we have John Kinsella — who began Salt. In Wales we have editor Ian
Gregson and in England we have Jane Holland who edits Horizon Review. We’re just about to open our Scottish office in
Glasgow, too; Elspeth Hamilton will be running Salt Scotland.

 

 

2. What are your
goals as a publisher?

 

By and large to survive and thrive, to create and protect
jobs and achieve financial security. Though beyond these rather opaque
ambitions there are many long and short term goals, some editorial, some
commercial. For example, we need to take the turnover of the business up to
around half a million to make it stable, the maths to make that happen is easy,
but turning the maths into profitable book sales is a daily concern.
Editorially, we have always wanted to build an independent platform for some
difficult genres, notably poetry and short stories, but we have ambitions to
gradually turn the press into a general trade publisher. This year we launch
our new children’s list. We’re also developing and eBook and audio book
programme.

 

 

3. What first brought
you to publishing?

 

It’s a different story for each of the directors, Linda
Bennett, John Skelton and I come from a publishing and bookselling background —
John ran the Open University Press, Linda was a business development director
in Waterstone’s and I worked for the best part of a decade for Cambridge
University Press, latterly as the Press Production Director. Jen was a senior
manager in the health service. All of the editors are writers and came into the
business through that route.

 

 

4. What do you
consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?

 

That’s a highly emotive and sometimes politicized question.
In my case, I’m in business and have to pay salaries and mortgages. It’s how I
earn my living. So in one very significant sense, the business has to work on a
commercial level and generate everyone’s income. I’ve no interest in being
small, I’ve had to start somewhere, but I’ll grow my business as long as it
employs me. We’ll just keep bringing people in, keep expanding the list and
push the business in to new directions. To be frank my list is as big as some I
left at Cambridge University Press — we publish several hundred ISBNs a year
now. I’ve no interest in constraining the business — if there’s a demand for
our books, we’ll keep publishing them. The market might constrain what we do of
course. I think culturally and strategically, being independent is more
important than being small. I think a big change comes when a small press
publisher says “I’m going to live off this business.” A whole raft of issues
hits you at that point. There are very many people who publish who don’t have
to survive off their profits. In some senses, everyone is a publisher now: we
live in an age of small presses.

 

 

5. What do you see
your press doing that no one else is?

 

Nothing, really. I don’t think Salt is exceptional. We’re in
a crowded market and have to compete to survive. The question is really one for
my customers, I imagine. I try to introduce new talent whenever I can afford
to. I have a very deep passion for great books and great writers.

 

 

6. What do you see as
the most effective way to get new publications out into the world?

 

Goodness me, what a question! There’s a thesis in that! It
really depends on what you’re asking. Do you mean in terms of producing books —
as in the media debate around eBooks, wood and sound? Or do you mean how one
publicises works and develops reception? The market for books is in may sectors
shrinking, but the changes in media are creating more route for writers to find
readers, especially through the internet and the World Wide Web. The Web is the
central concern of the age, and how businesses are migrating to the Web,
monetising it, exploiting it in commercial terms makes for a very interesting
set of business risks. Who publishes and what constitutes publishing is
changing daily. We live in an age of abundance, and yet many crave to have this
abundance edited for them, for others to construct meaningful, socially
meaningful, choices. In fact our sense of ourselves is highly informed by the
landscapes of choices we elect to live amongst. It’s hard to pick apart things
like  “effective”, “new” and
“world” in this context. The world is highly fragmented.

 

 

7. Do you take
submissions? If so, what are you looking for?

 

Yes, we do. I’m looking for something I can effectively
sell. I’m looking for things which meet discrete markets we’ve come to know and
sometimes for things I think I can create a market for. I’m looking for the best
work in any given form of writing. It’s not about my taste but about this
balance of knowing customers and sectors and having an insight into what makes
a book work in commercial terms.

 

 

8. How hands-on are
you as editors?

 

It varies enormously, I’m not a desk editor myself, I’m a
businessman, I do structurally edit from time to time, but I’ve a publishing
business to run and I often leave editorial matters to my editors and don’t
interfere unless it’s at the level of making acquisitions. Some writers I work
with quite extensively, in many cases we’re not taking on books that need
extensive editing — we’re not that kind of business. Most manuscripts arrive
heavily edited, often having been passed around colleagues over the years. They
do often need cutting. If somebody’s manuscript isn’t ready, we would probably
tell them that and let them come back to us after they’ve worked on it, often
with their peers, sometimes with an agent, a mentor or workshop leader.

 

9. Tell us what you
have published this year, and what you are going to publish.

 

That’s far too long a list! I published 209 ISBNs in 2009.
We’re going to be doing over 300 ISBNs this year, split across the UK, USA and
Australia & New Zealand. We’re launching a new children’s list, which I’m
very excited about. We might move, cautiously, into crime in 2010. We’ll do
more classics. We’ve developed a trade fiction list, and will be rolling that
out from October 2010. In the past week or so we’ve published David Briggs’
debut collection The Method Men,
Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s latest book of “Drafts” called Pitch: Drafts 77–95, Aaron Fagan’s second Salt collection Echo Train, Rosie Garner’s debut The Rain Diaries, Mark Granier’s Fade Street, Brian Henry’s latest Salt
collection Wings Without Birds, Agnieszka
Studzinska’s debut Snow Calling and
Robert Sullivan’s Shout Ha! To the Sky.  We issued five first time paperbacks,
too. I’m very excited about Matthew
Sweeney’s new selection of poems that we’re publishing in October, it’s
masterful, magisterial even.

 

10. And how do you
see the press evolving?

 

We’re at a crossroads. The recession hit us exceptionally
hard and we nearly went under a year ago. In some respects it’s tougher now and
we’ve had to think strategically over the past few months. Some might find
their instincts were to contract and consolidate. We’ve taken a different view,
to stratify and expand the business into several different models, different
business streams, and we intend to grow, quite considerably, in 2010. This
coming year provides three real challenges: trade fiction, the children’s list,
and expanding our US business. That’s more than enough to give me sleepless
nights for the rest of this year.