It was a strangely profound experience for me: the conversion from physical books to e-books. For years, the digital book world, constructed from uninspired and ridiculous sounding materials such as epub and mobipocket, orbited my peripheral vision like a moronic satellite. I, like many others, stubbornly continued to load my shelves with good old reliable physical books with the thought that if I didn’t entertain it, it would go away. My snobbery and I were clearly not alone. For years, the volume of physical book sales endured and publishers and bookstores alike were relieved of their anxiety around what might happen should this satellite fall to earth and release its alien virus upon the planet. Those within the industry clearly did not want to be contaminated.

Working in the publishing industry as I do, I came across the topic of digital books often, in corridors, cafes and meeting rooms, and the conversation was never one of jollity or merriment. It was as if a malfunctioning sewer was threatening our water supply, endangering the purity which prevailed within the reverential realm of literary imaginings and properly constructed sentences, a purity which I, and many others, nobly worshipped. Reading is indeed my religion. Through my beloved books, I learn about life and the universe, about myself and, more importantly, about you; I am moved, inspired, thrilled, horrified, disgusted, amused, and relieved; I relate to my environment, develop opinions, beliefs, ideas, longings and understanding; I fall in love; I live, and die. When e-books appeared I feared my flawless literary universe would be sullied by imperfection, infiltrated by the ranting of imbeciles planted within pages I couldn’t smell or touch, and which weren’t really books at all. Quality of life was imperilled; standards of living jeopardized. Never would I entertain such shoddiness.

But actually, as it turns out, I would. One day, reminiscent of a profound religious conversion, I sold my soul… to a Kindle. It wasn’t a dramatic moment of enlightenment; in fact, the circumstances surrounding the event were shamefully bland. The truth is, I was going on holiday for two weeks to Greece and had a vast reading list to take with me so I did the sensible thing and bought a Kindle. But I did not expect what happened to me next. Over those two weeks I was woken from my obdurate stupor and became a true e-book fanatic, and now, I am on a worldwide mission to convert the ignorant, which of course includes most of you!

Reflecting on my initial resistance to electronic books, what I find most interesting is the impression we are under that we have sensibly considered the pros and cons in order to make our decision: for the resistors, the cons clearly outweigh the pros. But they don’t; it’s a downright lie. The shocking truth is there are no cons and this for me was a phenomenal realisation: if there is no downside to e-books what, then, was telling me for so long that I shouldn’t like them? What was causing me to feel that I would be betraying something dear to my heart should I succumb? Where exactly was this sewer? All I found during my two weeks in Greece was a glitch-free and delightfully punctuated load of books which I did not have to pay for in kilos at the airport. I am fascinated by the psychology of this situation and by my personal revelation; I have therefore laid out the pros and cons as I find them, so you too can be relieved of your physical book burden.

Pros

·         Since the .epub and .mobi formats have been refined the e-book reading experience has become almost flawless. If the book has been converted well (and I know there are still those who don’t bother to do this), there should no longer be the glitches in the text that we once saw, such as misplaced hyphens, jarring gaps, and random widows and orphans.

·         E-reader technology is now superb, whether it is a Kindle, tablet or Smartphone, so an e-book read can be an aesthetically delightful experience.

·         Accessibility is fantastic. Log in, pay and download: three steps which take two minutes and you have your new book, sitting neatly on your virtual bookshelf and ready to read.

·         E-books are now decidedly cheaper than physical books, or most are, since the huge printing and distribution costs attached to physical books are not applied. At Ravine Press, all our quality fiction and non-fiction e-books are under £5 and some are as low as £0.99. We adore being able to provide remarkable books that everyone can afford.

·         Physical books need physical space, which means they take up precious room in our homes and offices, gathering dust and weighing down our shelves. You can carry hundreds of books at a time in your handbag (or man bag), which don’t weigh any more than the device you need to read them on.

·         Searching and referencing is a doddle. My books are no longer filled with multi-coloured Post-it notes marking specific quotes and citations in a particular title. This is one of my favourite e-book features as I can waste a lot of time getting lost in a book looking for a single passage that I know is in there somewhere!

·         The lightness of the e-reading device makes a book easier to hold. Therefore reading an e-book is more comfortable than having to manage hundreds of cumbersome pages between our fingers.

·         You can choose your font size and your page view. The flexibility and control given to readers via the technology is surprisingly agreeable.

·         E-books are clean. They don’t need dusting, get damp, or smell. Their covers don’t bend or tear or fade; their spines don’t split.

·         They are environmentally friendly. No trees are cut down to produce them, no heavy machinery is used to print them and no fuel is used to deliver them to your door.

From our point of view as a publisher there is another significant upside to digital publishing. Ravine Press exists to support talented writers whose voices are overlooked due to their writing supposedly lacking commercialism. We believe that the digital e-book arena, if employed with intelligence and integrity, is a significant platform from which hidden voices can speak loud and clear.

The pros really are impressive, aren’t they? So what about the cons?

Cons

The only con I can come up with is an industry complaint rather than an e-book complaint, but it does need mentioning: DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection. This is a technology used by (big) publishers to control the use of digital content after sale. We don’t like DRM protection at Ravine Press because it is restrictive and limits a book’s flexibility and longevity. Books should be for life, and to do with what we will, even e-books.

There is another issue, a big issue, but one which also applies to physical books. At Ravine Press we are concerned about the quality of writing in the industry as a whole. It is on a downward spiral and many in the business associate this drop in quality with the e-book revolution; this is unfortunately where we meet our sewer. However, we believe the blame should not be dumped on the concept of digital publishing per se, but instead: First, to the many (but by no means all) self-publishers who think they can write but who frankly can’t, and who are also responsible for not having their books professionally edited. Second, to the online distributors/retailers such as Amazon and Smashwords who provide the same self-pubs with carte blanche to distribute some truly ghastly books. These are the contaminants of the e-book industry, in my view, and is somewhere my snobbery continues to reside.

I think the crux of whether or not you enjoy, and therefore accept, the electronic reading experience comes down to display technology: to love an e-book you have to love technology, and I adore it; it is seductive and benevolent to the core. If you don’t feel the same, then the conversion I am after here is unlikely to occur, and the smelly old-fashioned dusty heavy book world will be yours for a long time to come.

Love our e-books at www.ravinepress.com.

‘E-publishing: a monster with two heads.’ 

This is a publishing industry colleague’s vision, some years ago, of the ascending digital age. What he meant was digital would provide the pleasure and convenience of creating one’s own books, but the possible sacrifice within the writing/publishing/marketing process was bound to change things in the literary field. Should digital comfort ever replace traditional sweat, he said, it might have a negative impact on literary talent, or even go as far as causing it to become extinct. We would find ourselves with unskilled writers dominating an unskilled industry.

Heavy words from my friend, but are they true?

We all have to admit that the digital publishing age is upon us, and its allure is strong: it is practical, ecological, compact, and just about every writer loves the idea. But just because you can do something - i.e. write a quick book and fit it together - doesn’t necessarily mean you should. Unless seeing yourself in print is as far as you ever wish to go, it could turn out to be an unfruitful and disheartening ride, fraught with lack of industry know-how, and headache marketing.

While all this sounds pessimistic, I’m actually in favour of the digital revolution. If managed well it can do everyone a lot of good, across the writing/publishing field, but we don’t have to sacrifice talent. Believing that golden opportunities lurk at the other end of a few clicks shouldn’t necessarily inspire complacency. There is of course plenty of help out there - for the right price – and another industry is busy blossoming: one where anyone can pay any price to enjoy that ‘I’m a published author’ feeling.

‘One of the bigger surprises this year, according to analysts, was a marked slowdown in the decline of physical book sales,’ so Robert Budden of the Financial Times said, while Richard Mollett of the Publishers Association said, ‘This is another strong year for digital which has more than offset a slight decline in physical.’

Having paddled in the shallows of the publishing industry as an in-house magazine editor, I cannot help but ask: Is the two-headed beast beginning to threaten everyone at last? Do I smell a whiff of anxiety among mainstream publishers? People in the industry are scared. Make no mistake. The digital revolution is upon us whether we like it or not, and it is about to plunge us into new ways of doing things. We will all have to go digital in the end.

Although mainstream publishing and the physical book still have the edge, there is in fact a publishing war going on. Two armies, with sticks and a lot of silent shouting are at the gates as the walls of a conventional industry threaten to come tumbling down. Digital is the threat, but as innocent as it may be it is causing us to risk losing vital elements within the writing/publishing/marketing process: good professional editing and marketing being two of them.

‘The road to ignorance is paved with good editors,’ said George Bernard Shaw. Even Socrates was known to say, ‘The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.’ Good editors are the stuff of a book’s soul. If your book, however good it may seem, hasn’t been blessed with the eye of the perceptive professional editor, it simply won’t hit the mark, and could spell the difference between an exceptional book and an embarrassingly bland one.

The mainstream publishing side of the monster (probably the biggest of the two heads) has been big business since the 1960s, more or less. It has grown phenomenally yet has changed drastically over the decades. Having begun life as something of a ‘cottage industry’ in the early twentieth century, it occupied a different world back then. Virginia Woolf, when writing for the Hogarth Press, the publishing company she created with her husband, Leonard, was able to write and market in a very different universe. It was personal rather than finance-driven. Not so now. And this is where mainstream has lost the plot. There’s no getting away from the fact that throughout the first half of the twentieth century the literary scene was bursting with talent, oomph and dare, the industry turning out writers such as Woolf, Hemingway, Huxley, Orwell, Lawrence, Tolkien, Somerset Maugham, Nesbit, Mansfield, Lewis, Salinger, Christie, Waugh, Scott Fitzgerald, du Maurier, Joyce, Conrad, Barrie, Kipling, Sayers, Forster - the list is endless. These writers are without doubt in a league, and an era, of their own.

Do I believe these writers were more talented than those who are writing today? Of course I don’t. I believe the talented are still out there - even if they are a little thin on the ground. A trend resulting from the digital age is that skills are diminished as an expectation, i.e. you can write well if you want to but don’t necessarily have to: an expectation which wouldn’t at all have suited the earlier writers. But there’s a more important question here: could earlier writers fit in to the digital age we are enjoying now? They might expect courtesy and the personal touch (as well as good editors) at the very least. Times and requirements have changed significantly in just fifty years; if talented writers are here, then they are not always on the lists of mainstream publishers with their bias towards celebrity status. Many good writers are now with independent publishers, by choice, because they appreciate the right kind of editing/selling, and particularly the personal touch.

Let’s be honest, most serious writers wouldn’t describe writing as a particularly comfortable craft, even though they can’t help doing it. Some are, unmistakably, born geniuses, but even the geniuses have to work hard to land where they do. Hemingway’s, ‘There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed,’ says it all perfectly. Where are the bleeders? - if you’ll pardon the expression. An unfathomable and over-the-top comment this may be - especially from the average self-published author’s point of view - but it aptly sums up the creative writing process. Some may try their best to write; some may get the bug after sticking at it awhile and perhaps ‘bleeding’ a little, which may eventually result in perfecting the craft. Perhaps, Orwell’s, ‘Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness,’ also applies here. Let’s get real. Let’s restore our loyalty to the craft. Let’s see writing as an intelligent art form, at the very least, because it pains me to think of talent passing us by because it is now almost totally unnoticeable, just as much as it pains me when self-published authors expect returns for work that has no sweat in it. It in fact pains me enough to have me do something about it.

Having retired from the publishing industry some years ago, but having kept a hand in, I still have that thrill and sense of urgency when I discover new writers. I realised that I would need to be armed with more than a sticking plaster if jumping back in to take up the greatest literary challenge: to make quality writing work in this digital revolution we’re in, and to take up arms in the publishing war. We need to hear those hidden voices speak.

That is why I couldn’t refuse when a colleague and I decided that the launch of a new digital publishing company (catering for those who bleed), Ravine Press, is timely; if I am adamant about anything it’s being in a position where, as ex-industry, I can help to provide a service that makes a stand for those hidden voices who might otherwise remain hidden. There are writers out there whose talents and messages are being overlooked by mainstream, as we speak.

The point is that a small publishing company can help exceptional new writers because it can afford to help them. We are of course small, and for that reason are able to preserve the personal touch. As strange as it sounds, we’ll be able to care; we will not allow the art of writing and the ability to produce professionally, face extinction.

Jason Epstein, who began as a slush-pile reader for Doubleday, believed that the successful future publishing company would be like the Random House of the 1950s - a little like Virginia Woolf was in the other universe. The company would be composed of a ‘small group of likeminded managers’. He also believed publishers should be improvisational, personal, devoted, small scale. Was he seeing Ravine Press? I believe that if you love a craft you should inevitably love supporting and promoting it. It would now be impossible for me to work alongside people who serve that other monster: the industry that doesn’t even acknowledge that a publishing war is raging outside its door.

The large will always outweigh the small, but the small’s time has come.

After the exhaustion, the bleeding and the pain, writers need a door to knock upon which understands the adventurers, the visionaries, those who challenge and dare, those who don’t mind voicing the pain. These are the writers our small publishing company, Ravine Press, will be looking for. These constitute those hidden voices that need to speak.

‘Good prose is like a windowpane,’ Orwell said, and indeed it is. Here’s the rub: what you write needs to be almost completely unnoticeable: the extraordinary sitting within the ordinary. As a commissioning editor I don’t wish to feel your discomfort within your writing (or all the smears on the pane); writing needs to surprise and thrill me by making me believe it’s there but I don’t happen to have noticed it. There is a rich view to be had through that windowpane, and we at Ravine Press want to find those writers who want to provide that.

If you’re the kind who wants to write a book but haven’t done it yet, there is room for you to learn your craft with professionals. Alongside taking on the exceptionally skilled writers at Ravine, we will be developing a sister company to help the not so skilled with a professional publishing service, assistance and tips - which includes the vital editing process.

Ravine Press will be championing subjects such as psychology, autism, prehistory, magical realism, science fiction and environmentalism. It goes without saying that having shed the mainstream publishing industry, I am happy, at last, to have an opportunity to help and enjoy the work of those who bleed.

The war is on, and we women at Ravine are not aiming to take prisoners.