\u00a0 Chris Hamilton-Emery <\/span>supplies the answers.
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\n<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nTen Questions<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nName: Salt<\/span><\/p>\nDOB: 2000<\/span><\/p>\nHometown: Perth, Australia<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n1. Who is Salt?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nSalt\u2019s board consists of Linda Bennett, Chris
\nHamilton-Emery, Jen Hamilton-Emery and John Skelton. In the Cambridge sales
\noffice there are Sarah-Jayne Johnson and Lee Smith as well as a range of
\ninterns from Anglia Ruskin University, currently James Miller and Alexandra
\nThurman. Overseas we have Janet McAdams and her Earthworks team of editors,
\nthat includes Katherine Hedeen, Gordon Henry Jr and V\u00edctor Rodr\u00edguez-N\u00fa\u00f1ez. In
\nAustralia we have John Kinsella \u2014 who began Salt. In Wales we have editor Ian
\nGregson and in England we have Jane Holland who edits Horizon Review.<\/em> We\u2019re just about to open our Scottish office in
\nGlasgow, too; Elspeth Hamilton will be running Salt Scotland.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n2. What are your
\ngoals as a publisher? <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nBy and large to survive and thrive, to create and protect
\njobs and achieve financial security. Though beyond these rather opaque
\nambitions there are many long and short term goals, some editorial, some
\ncommercial. For example, we need to take the turnover of the business up to
\naround half a million to make it stable, the maths to make that happen is easy,
\nbut turning the maths into profitable book sales is a daily concern.
\nEditorially, we have always wanted to build an independent platform for some
\ndifficult genres, notably poetry and short stories, but we have ambitions to
\ngradually turn the press into a general trade publisher. This year we launch
\nour new children\u2019s list. We\u2019re also developing and eBook and audio book
\nprogramme.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n3. What first brought
\nyou to publishing?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nIt\u2019s a different story for each of the directors, Linda
\nBennett, John Skelton and I come from a publishing and bookselling background \u2014
\nJohn ran the Open University Press, Linda was a business development director
\nin Waterstone\u2019s and I worked for the best part of a decade for Cambridge
\nUniversity Press, latterly as the Press Production Director. Jen was a senior
\nmanager in the health service. All of the editors are writers and came into the
\nbusiness through that route. <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n4. What do you
\nconsider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThat\u2019s a highly emotive and sometimes politicized question.
\nIn my case, I\u2019m in business and have to pay salaries and mortgages. It\u2019s how I
\nearn my living. So in one very significant sense, the business has to work on a
\ncommercial level and generate everyone\u2019s income. I\u2019ve no interest in being
\nsmall, I\u2019ve had to start somewhere, but I\u2019ll grow my business as long as it
\nemploys me. We\u2019ll just keep bringing people in, keep expanding the list and
\npush the business in to new directions. To be frank my list is as big as some I
\nleft at Cambridge University Press \u2014 we publish several hundred ISBNs a year
\nnow. I\u2019ve no interest in constraining the business \u2014 if there\u2019s a demand for
\nour books, we\u2019ll keep publishing them. The market might constrain what we do of
\ncourse. I think culturally and strategically, being independent is more
\nimportant than being small. I think a big change comes when a small press
\npublisher says \u201cI\u2019m going to live off this business.\u201d A whole raft of issues
\nhits you at that point. There are very many people who publish who don\u2019t have
\nto survive off their profits. In some senses, everyone is a publisher now: we
\nlive in an age of small presses.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n5. What do you see
\nyour press doing that no one else is?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nNothing, really. I don\u2019t think Salt is exceptional. We\u2019re in
\na crowded market and have to compete to survive. The question is really one for
\nmy customers, I imagine. I try to introduce new talent whenever I can afford
\nto. I have a very deep passion for great books and great writers. <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n6. What do you see as
\nthe most effective way to get new publications out into the world?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nGoodness me, what a question! There\u2019s a thesis in that! It
\nreally depends on what you\u2019re asking. Do you mean in terms of producing books \u2014
\nas in the media debate around eBooks, wood and sound? Or do you mean how one
\npublicises works and develops reception? The market for books is in may sectors
\nshrinking, but the changes in media are creating more route for writers to find
\nreaders, especially through the internet and the World Wide Web. The Web is the
\ncentral concern of the age, and how businesses are migrating to the Web,
\nmonetising it, exploiting it in commercial terms makes for a very interesting
\nset of business risks. Who publishes and what constitutes publishing is
\nchanging daily. We live in an age of abundance, and yet many crave to have this
\nabundance edited for them, for others to construct meaningful, socially
\nmeaningful, choices. In fact our sense of ourselves is highly informed by the
\nlandscapes of choices we elect to live amongst. It\u2019s hard to pick apart things
\nlike\u00a0 <\/span>\u201ceffective\u201d, \u201cnew\u201d and
\n\u201cworld\u201d in this context. The world is highly fragmented.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n7. Do you take
\nsubmissions? If so, what are you looking for?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nYes, we do. I\u2019m looking for something I can effectively
\nsell. I\u2019m looking for things which meet discrete markets we\u2019ve come to know and
\nsometimes for things I think I can create a market for. I\u2019m looking for the best
\nwork in any given form of writing. It\u2019s not about my taste but about this
\nbalance of knowing customers and sectors and having an insight into what makes
\na book work in commercial terms.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n8. How hands-on are
\nyou as editors?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nIt varies enormously, I\u2019m not a desk editor myself, I\u2019m a
\nbusinessman, I do structurally edit from time to time, but I\u2019ve a publishing
\nbusiness to run and I often leave editorial matters to my editors and don\u2019t
\ninterfere unless it\u2019s at the level of making acquisitions. Some writers I work
\nwith quite extensively, in many cases we\u2019re not taking on books that need
\nextensive editing \u2014 we\u2019re not that kind of business. Most manuscripts arrive
\nheavily edited, often having been passed around colleagues over the years. They
\ndo often need cutting. If somebody\u2019s manuscript isn\u2019t ready, we would probably
\ntell them that and let them come back to us after they\u2019ve worked on it, often
\nwith their peers, sometimes with an agent, a mentor or workshop leader. <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n9. Tell us what you
\nhave published this year, and what you are going to publish.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThat\u2019s far too long a list! I published 209 ISBNs in 2009.
\nWe\u2019re going to be doing over 300 ISBNs this year, split across the UK, USA and
\nAustralia & New Zealand. We\u2019re launching a new children\u2019s list, which I\u2019m
\nvery excited about. We might move, cautiously, into crime in 2010. We\u2019ll do
\nmore classics. We\u2019ve developed a trade fiction list, and will be rolling that
\nout from October 2010. In the past week or so we\u2019ve published David Briggs\u2019
\ndebut collection The Method Men<\/em>,
\nRachel Blau DuPlessis\u2019s latest book of \u201cDrafts\u201d called Pitch: Drafts 77\u201395<\/em>, Aaron Fagan\u2019s second Salt collection Echo Train<\/em>, Rosie Garner\u2019s debut The Rain Diaries<\/em>, Mark Granier\u2019s Fade Street<\/em>, Brian Henry\u2019s latest Salt
\ncollection Wings Without Birds<\/em>, Agnieszka
\nStudzinska\u2019s debut Snow Calling<\/em> and
\nRobert Sullivan\u2019s Shout Ha! To the Sky<\/em>.\u00a0 <\/span>We issued five first time paperbacks,
\ntoo. I\u2019m very<\/em> excited about Matthew
\nSweeney\u2019s new selection of poems that we\u2019re publishing in October, it\u2019s
\nmasterful, magisterial even.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n10. And how do you
\nsee the press evolving?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWe\u2019re at a crossroads. The recession hit us exceptionally
\nhard and we nearly went under a year ago. In some respects it\u2019s tougher now and
\nwe\u2019ve had to think strategically over the past few months. Some might find
\ntheir instincts were to contract and consolidate. We\u2019ve taken a different view,
\nto stratify and expand the business into several different models, different
\nbusiness streams, and we intend to grow, quite considerably, in 2010. This
\ncoming year provides three real challenges: trade fiction, the children\u2019s list,
\nand expanding our US business. That\u2019s more than enough to give me sleepless
\nnights for the rest of this year.<\/span><\/p>\n\n
\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is the first in a new series called Ten Questions in which IS&T will be talking to small presses.\u00a0 Here, Director of Salt Publishing\u00a0 Chris Hamilton-Emery supplies the answers. Ten Questions \u00a0 \u00a0 Name: Salt DOB: 2000 Hometown: Perth, Australia \u00a0 1. Who is Salt? \u00a0 Salt\u2019s board consists of Linda Bennett, Chris Hamilton-Emery, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=633"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1921,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633\/revisions\/1921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}