Archive for May, 2009

I received this email last week from a writer contact who is doing her bit to help Salt Publishing which is going under. It’s a desperate plea for help to keep the enterprise afloat.

I’m not sure what my views or feelings are about this “Save the Whale”- style campaign. The idea seems to be that you can do your bit by buying just one book from them - any book. It doesn’t matter if you want it or will read it, just do it out of charity or pity. Is this a good business model for the future of the publishing house? What happens after the charity donations are all used up - will they go round with cap in hand again? Why not forget publishing books altogether and just hand round the tin cup?

At the same time, I can understand their desperation. The publishing industry is at a cross roads at the moment, with the big J K Rowling type blockbusters make heaps of money and the lesser known gems just shrivelling away into nothing. Small publishers and small bookshops have their role in the community and in getting literary gems out to the public. I can also connect with the sentiment that “if you love literature, help keep it alive” - but if you’re just buying a book out of pity, does that really help literature?

I think we’re facing a huge shift in mindset and culture - people are no longer reading books but they are engaging in ideas and thoughts in other ways eg via multimedia and online. This is clearly evidenced in what’s happening to Salt Publishing. Is the way forward for publishers to rethink how they engage with their customers eg via e-books or re-inventing themselves as content publishers rather than purely paper book publishers? Or is it even more radical than that - that passive content is no longer enough but that people are looking for interactivity/ collaboration and all those other social media style ways of engaging?

I don’t know the answer. As a writer, I’m watching these developments closely as I have a vested interest in publishers surviving and thriving. But as a consumer, I myself prefer movies, TV series, downloadable content, blogs and other online multimedia. The only books I buy these days are non-fiction history, biography, business, running and tech or communications related books because they give me real value that I can’t find elsewhere. Sad to say, I don’t read novels anymore because they are made up - I want to know about the real world and real people and real events….

What do you think? Can you - will you - help Salt Publishing in the way they have asked? Or can you think of another way to help them - or any other small publishing house?

Here’s the email in full:

——

Saving Salt Publishing: Just One Book
Friday, May 22, 2009

As many of you will know, Jen and I have been struggling to keep Salt moving since June last year when the economic downturn began to affect our press. Our three year funding ends this year: we’ve £4,000 due from Arts Council England in a final payment, but cannot apply through Grants for the Arts for further funding for Salt’s operations. Spring sales were down nearly 80% on the previous year, and despite April’s much improved trading, the past twelve months has left us with a budget deficit of over £55,000. It’s proving to be a very big hole and we’re having to take some drastic measures to save our business.

JUST ONE BOOK

1. Please buy just one book, right now. We don’t mind from where, you can buy it from us or from Amazon, your local shop or megastore, online or offline. If you buy just one book now, you’ll help to save Salt. Timing is absolutely everything here. We need cash now to stay afloat. If you love literature, help keep it alive. All it takes is just one book sale. Go to our online store and help us keep going.

UK and International
http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop/index.php

USA
http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop-us/index.php

2. Share this note on your Facebook or MySpace profile. Tell your friends. If we can spread the word about our cash crisis, we can hopefully find more sales and save our literary publishing. Remember it’s just one book, that’s all it takes to save us. Please do it now.

If you want to follow the news story you can read more on The Bookseller site here: http://www.thebookseller.com/news/86331-salt-campaigns-for-survival.html

Or to our Facebook note here:
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=100619421203

Or to our spoof YouTube campaign
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdcTqXaOD2s

Chris and Jen,
Salt

In today’s show:

I’m still not able to run but fortunately, have a lot of other fun things to distract me.

My sister and I take my mum to Strasbourg for her 70th birthday treat - that’s Strasbourg in France, not Salzberg in Austria - and find few tourists and a lot of great shopping in the city’s lovely medieval streets.

Back at home, we watch Running the Sahara, a documentary about three guys who run across Africa from Senegal to Egypt and the Red Sea.

Our friend Mick, the beekeeper, gives us a tour of the Kent House Road Allotments in South London and we come back to our half-finished vegetable patch in the back garden with fresh inspiration.

Photos of the allotments, including South London vineyards, are in the slideshow below:

Then - to round off the show, I tentatively start running again, with my ankle strapped up and feeling a little bit anxious about whether it will hold out….

You can listen to the podcast using the grey podcast-player at the end of this post…

…Or, in the main player below, where you can also check out other Fusion View podcasts:

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When I visit a different culture or country I like to make sure I eat the local food as much as I can — and if I possible, immerse myself completely by not having any meal that comes from my own British or Malaysian culture.

I spent a few days in Strasbourg recently with my mother and sister. It’s my mum’s 70th birthday this year and my sister and I took her on this trip as a birthday treat. We were all curious to try the local Alsatian specialities as Strasbourg is right on the French/German border and the French cuisine there has a heavy German influence.

We were immediately charmed by the city of Strasbourg when we arrived. The old city is essentially an island encircled by canals and River Ill. It is largely pedestrianised in this area with most people walking, cycling or using the very quiet and efficient tram system. Many of the buildings date from the mediaeval period, with lots of timber framed houses that seemed to me more Bavarian than French. The main cobbled streets are punctuated by quaint little alleyways where we discovered many little boutique shops, cafes, restaurants and winstubs, the Alsace region’s equivalent of British pubs or Holland’s brown cafes. Everyone was very friendly and helpful — and we were struck by how most people easily switched between French, German and English.

On our first day, we came across what seemed to us a typical winstub down a side alley near the cathedral. It was a bright sunny day and it is a moment to adjust to the gym light when we stepped through the heavy wooden doors. It reminded me very much of a typical British pub, with exposed wooden beams, wood panelling and coloured glass in the windows — but with a more rugged roughhewn ambience. We excitedly chose three platters from the Alsatian specialities section of the menu. I had confit de canard while my sister chose the knuckle of pork and my mother had the selection of smoked meat: sausage, belly pork, ham and some kind of meatball pate. When the dishes arrived, they were completely enormous and loaded with piles of sauerkraut and boiled potatoes. We dug in with relish as we had not eaten since very early in the morning and we thoroughly enjoyed the first quarter of the meal as the unfamiliar tastes of smoked meat and sour cabbage gave us the sense of having arrived in a foreign and exotic place.

However, the novelty began to wear off as we realised that we were already full and still had a mountain of meat and sauerkraut to wade through. It was not long before we were soundly defeated.. We waddled out into the bright alleyway, blinking in the sunlight and feeling rather like battery pigs that had been forcefully stuffed with food and were now being momentarily released into the exercise yard.

I don’t know whether we were just very un-lucky or whether it’s just that Alsatian food is ultimately not to our taste but after a couple more meals in the local restaurants, I was pining for rice and some stirfried vegetables. The smell of sauerkraut seemed to permeate most of the restaurants and brasseries. When we ordered other more specifically French dishes rather than the Alsatian meet specialities, they seemed to be heavily laden with cream and left us feeling solid, stolid and staunch. Even their salads seemed to come sob and in thick, creamy mayonnaise style dressing. We tried the other local speciality, flamenkuchen, which is somewhat like a pizza but with a very thin crusty base and made with sour cream and smoked meats — that also had the effect of making me feel rather queasy and stuffed to the gills afterwards.

There were some wonderful patisserie is and I have to confess that we voluntarily indulged in a mouthwatering pastries filled with custard and cream and sugar and chocolate. These definitely made up for the sauerkraut! But, unfortunately, their effect on our stomachs and waistlines were not filed different from the stodgy main meals…

Some evenings, we were too tired after a day’s sightseeing or shopping, and instead of going out to a restaurant, we had a picnic in the hotel room of onion tart, quiche lorraine, smoked meats and olives. One night, we finally crumbled and dashed to a Thai restaurant and had some lovely rice dishes, to our great relief! Unlike most Thai restaurants in the UK, the portions were enormous and the duck dish that I had was one of the tastiest meals I had all holiday — the dark was done with a spicy prawns with a hint of coconut: an unusual but very successful combination.

I was very relieved to arrive back home to my usual diet of fresh vegetables, salad, brown rice, brown bread and light sauces. Which is not to say that I am vegetarian or vegan or anything other than a hearty meat eater! One of my favourite meals is a nice thick slab of steak. But what the holiday did make me realise is that my general daily diet is pretty healthy. I’m just not used to thick cream sauces, preserved vegetables and preserved meats, overly salted food and sugary things made with white flour. All these things are wonderful treats from time to time and enjoyable for being occasional indulgences - but having them every day and every meal is just way too much for my constitution to bear!

I am now going to spend the next few weeks working of all the Michelin Man tyres that have appeared round my midriff in the last few days. It’s not going to be much fun starting up my running again as I will be lugging this extra weight around with me!

When my nephew was little he came to visit London from the country village in the Heart of England where my brother and his wife have made their home. It was fun to get together as a big family group to do touristy and kiddy things in London - there was my brother and my sister-in-law, my sister, my mum (who absolutely loves playing Granny), me, my partner and between us, we showed him the town. We took Little Nephew to the Planetarium, the London Zoo, HMS Belfast, the Aquarium, Chinatown, piling into cabs to be whizzed around town in style.

Towards the end of the few days, I asked Little Nephew, “What do you think of London?”

We were in a black cab, circling Trafalgar Square. Little Nephew was around 7 or 8 around that time, looking out of the window at the hoardes of people feeding the pigeons and taking photos. He turned to me and said, “London is a very big village.”

He looked puzzled as we all burst out laughing, teasing my brother and his wife that they were a family of little country mouses.

Sometime later, as they got ready to head out of the big city back to their little village, I asked Little Nephew, “What did you like best of all about your visit to London?”

I wondered if he was going to say that it was pretending to shoot enemy aircraft with the big machine guns on HMS Belfast or watching the pirinha being fed at the Aquarium. Or laughing at the penguins at the Zoo. Or eating the delicous meals in Chinatown.

Without hesitation, he said, “Riding in taxis!”

I have to agree with him there. One of THE best things about London is the black cab.

For most of us Londoners, we usually see the city from underground, squashed in the tube, or from the confines of a bus, jammed against other bodies on our daily commute. We find ourselves beaten down by the drudgery of it all, jostled and assaulted by others’s smells and prickly personal spaces. But when we fork out the cash for a taxi cab ride, for that one special journey, London seems to be re-born anew for us.

Cocooned in our own personal, private space, cosily separated from the hoi-polloi - and even the driver himself/ herself - we can sit back in the cab’s spacious seats and look with refreshed eyes on the beauty of London. I LOVE taking London taxis! I love it that I am seated above the rest of the traffic, I love the panoramic windows, I love the intercom system that allows you to make your conversations private but also, if need be, avoid your having to raise your voice to speak to the driver. I am amazed by the drivers universal knowledge of the city and its back streets - how you don’t need to give them any directions, even to the most obscure part of urban sprawl, and they’ll get you there by the quickest route. Instead of seeing the grungy pavements and feeling invaded by other people, I can gaze up at the city’s historic sites: the National Gallery, Monument, Harrods… And even the less exciting areas like Elephant & Castle, Vauxhall, the Hanger Lane gyratory system - all look interesting and vibrant, instead of dreary and depressing.

If I could afford it, I’d have my own personal black cab waiting for me every morning to take me to work and every evening to convey me home again - and at my beck and call to take me anywhere I please. Sigh. Such is the stuff of dreams…

Photo: thanks to patrick mayon from flickr.com (CCL)

In today’s show:

I check out the live phoneblogging platform Ipadio.com with some live phoneblogs on my mobile phone.

I’m feeling sorry for myself as I have done something to my leg and can’t run - to my great dismay.

But socializing with friends keeps me entertained. Some of the sites and friends I mention are:

# Kenny who blogs at Life for Beginners, visits from Malaysia and tells me about “foodcrawls”, the greedy person’s equivalant of pubcrawls

# An energetic young barrister tells me about adventure racing, a triathlon like sport that’s catching on in the UK

# Lybbe in Canada sends me an email comment about my podcast. Lybbe’s blog “Blah blah blah” is at http://lybbe1631.blogspot.com/ - her bio says, “Life long weight problem. Decided at 308 pounds (or more) that I wasn’t going to let myself slide any further. I’ve lost over 100 pounds and have about 50 more to lose. I feel better than I did 20 years ago, and I know I have lengthened my life expectancy.” Also, check out her new podcast, Fifty Counting Down.

You can listen to the podcast using the grey podcast-player at the end of this post…

…Or, in the main player below, where you can also check out other Fusion View podcasts:

You can also receive this and future Fusion View Podcasts free via iTunes - click on the lavender logo alongside.

Listen Now:

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