I have, over a career longer than I care to itemise for tax purposes, been handed a great many things by nervous strangers across a desk. Or in plain envelopes by a grinning mail boy. Manuscripts, mostly. Tickets to Dodgers games, even better.
Once, memorably, a lock of curly hair. That's a story in itself and one day I might share it.
What I have never before been handed is a business card with my own name on it and a title I invented myself.
Editor-in-Chief. I rather like the sound of that. A first, at my illustrious age. When I was little, Dem Bums were actually playing in Brooklyn and they moved at a faster pace than reality could match my dreams. So, indulge me in these senior years.
Welcome to the first dispatch from Emotional Support Books – ESB to its friends – and I am led to believe we are going to have friends, because that is rather the point of a mailing list. You are on it because at some point you handed over an email address out of curiosity. This is the first instalment. I apologise in advance for the parts that are boring, but I'm writing for those who take an interest in publishing, rather than reading novels.
You want authors and their conceits, sign up for the authors. They will drip-feed you snippets of their wonderful work until you buy the thing as a way to end the torture.
Those who have followed me for some time will know that I take an interest in AI. I think it's mainly a fascinating toy for creative purposes but I have been seduced by its ability to set up business systems. I'm sceptical but if I can get it to handle the finances and the paperwork while I lean back, read good books and clock off for an afternoon nap, who am I to complain?
The sign on the door
A press, properly speaking, is a machine that squashes ink onto paper, and we don't have one of those. What we have instead is an ABN, a domain name, a spreadsheet with entirely too many tabs, and a founder who has read somewhere that "packaging and presentation" sells good books more than good books sell themselves.
He is not wrong. Packaging and presentation is the whole game. Nobody but a slushpile editor has ever fallen in love with a manuscript. It's just words in a row and our submission guidelines discourage decoration or baseball tickets.
A discouraging sign – AI image by Google
Readers fall in love with the thing the manuscript becomes: the cover that stops a thumb mid-scroll, the chunky weight of a paperback that is not a page, not a paragraph too long, the small print on the copyright page that quietly says someone here knew what they were doing. That is what I do. Emotional Support Books does not print books. We make books worth printing.
Hiring, of a sort
I use the word "staff" loosely, in the way one might describe a one-man rowing team as "the crew." So far the org chart consists of an editor (me), a graphic designer (a very patient piece of software), a bookkeeper called Excel, and a mailing list platform that has been promised it will one day be allowed to make decisions on its own about who gets which email.
I am told this is called "automation" and not, as I specified, "letting the robot run the newsletter while I have a long lunch." Turns out you still have to set the whole thing up first. Nobody warns you about that part.
The footnotes nobody sees
Somewhere between the cover art and the retailer upload sits a quiet, unglamorous swamp of stuff that has to be right or nothing else matters – copyright notices, ISBNs, the correct handling of a pen name – so the taxman and the reader are both, in their different ways, satisfied. I have spent three days this month reading various Australian government publications with the same grim dedication I once reserved for slush-pile submissions. Pray for my soul.
It is not romantic work. It will never make it into a launch-day post. But I promise you, the readers who eventually hold one of our books will never spot the difference between a press that sweated the details and one that didn't. Except in the look and feel of the thing. Solid, professional, confident. Comfortable. My work will fade into the background and the words the author gave me will be all that you notice.
What's actually coming
Two manuscripts are already on my desk, if a desk can be said to exist inside a laptop. One is set in the trenches and the cockpits of the Great War. A hero who is anything but, torn between remorse and revenge as he fires hot lead at people much like himself.
The other is a murder mystery set in Canberra, where one of the parkrun participants doesn't finish the course. Who did it? And why?
War and death, then, as our opening acts. Emotional Support Books, ladies and gentlemen! We provide comfort through catastrophe.
Both books, when they land, will look like something you'd want to be seen reading on a train. That is the whole promise. Everything else — the ABN, the spreadsheets, the small print, this newsletter — exists only to get us to that point without anybody noticing the scaffolding.
A beginning, properly marked
I am aware this first letter has mostly been about invoices and software, which may not be what you signed up for. But every Mockingbird, every Lord of the Rings began as manuscript pages with half-formed hopes, and ended as something that you could hold close, everything exactly in its place, all the tears and arguments, chiding and nagging hidden away. That happens backstage, and that's my domain.
So, dear reader, smiles first, hugs to follow, and a very great deal of paperwork in between. It's a beginning. Beginnings are meant to feel good, and against all my professional instincts as a cynic, I find that this one rather does. If I may be trite for a moment, it's the dawn of a new day in the publishing world. And my career, such as it is.
More soon, once this technoklutz of an editor has worked out where the graphic designer keeps the good fonts.
— DK