The Bookseller.com

2nd December 2008

Paul Brown is a co-founder and director of the independent trade publisher Tonto Books. He blogs at tontobooks.com/blog.

Taken for granted

17.03.08

Now that the dust has (just about) settled on the Arts Council's most recent round of funding changes, is it safe to consider grants for the arts from a different perspective? After multiple unsuccessful applications, we at Tonto Books have been awarded a one-off ACE grant to support our fiction output, so I suppose we are new beneficiaries of the decision to move funding around – but we're also experienced in surviving without funding. And one thing that has become crystal clear over the past few months is that no publisher can rely on receiving funding in the future.

Our much-appreciated grant will help us publish fiction from new writers from the North East of England who might otherwise not have been read. We've published fiction previously to good reviews, but financial restraints have meant we've always reluctantly had to cut corners and, in particular, rely on free-of-charge marketing. The grant will allow us to improve the reach of our fiction, but it won't pay our wages.

Although the company was initially formed to support new fiction, it quickly became apparent that we could not survive as a business on new fiction alone. We needed to diversify to survive, and for us that has meant publishing commercial non-fiction. For example, in 2006 we published a book about Alan Shearer that did reasonably well. One of our fiction writers emailed to ask, ‘Are you still selling my short stories collection, or are you too busy with that bloody football book?' Of course, that bloody football book was funding his short stories collection, and all of our other fiction titles for that year!

I strongly believe that grants should be available to help less profitable publishing ventures reach their audience, but I have mixed feelings about regular funding. If a publisher has been running for many years and consistently losing tens of thousands of pounds a year, should that shortfall be regularly plugged by the Arts Council? Or should that publisher have a rethink, streamline their operations, and attempt to make its less profitable output self-sufficient? Those tens of thousands of pounds could then be used to help new ventures grow and prosper.
 
There are no easy answers, but certainly the funding system desperately needed (and still needs) a good shake-up. There is no question that a lot of funding is wasted or misappropriated. I am sure I am not alone in having encountered small publishers who are quite happy to let books sit unread in garages with no effort at all to sell them because ‘the Arts Council has paid for them anyway'. One such publisher told me that he had never had a grant application turned down - infuriating for any organisation that has had an application rejected or had funding withdrawn. 

We've continued to publish commercial non-fiction, and without titles such as Jonny Kennedy: The Story of the Boy Whose Skin Fell Off and The Rocketbelt Caper – recently reinvented as a Hollywood movie called "Pretty Bird" – our tiny two-man company could not have survived. Supported by the odd freelance job and some creative writing tutoring, we have so far managed to avoid losing our houses . . . touch wood.

Most recently we have signed up a fantastic memoir by Ashley Hames, star of Bravo TV's bawdy Sin Cities programme. We'll be taking that, and other new books including the autobiography of Paralympic champion Stephen Miller, to the London Book Fair.

We'll also be taking the first of our ACE-supported fiction titles, Everything You Ever Wanted by Rosalind Wyllie and Being Normal by Stephen Shieber. Both are writers I think you'll hear a lot more about in the near future.