Just so you don’t think we’re greedy, we sent this out to news people but they weren’t interested. Maybe it’s because we’re only 10, or maybe it’s because we’re not connected enough. The important thing is we’re still here. I also wanted to add that one of the small publishers we admire is BOA Editions in the US, who recently turned 35 (another great press, Peepal Tree in the UK turned 25); BOA got coverage on Publisher’s Weekly – I’m sure we will when we’re that old.

Anyway, here are a few tips for those who aspire to a life in small press publishing…

1. Remain a dreamer: remember that you started publishing because you wanted to see something different out there, hold on to that vision and use that as fuel to carry on through the tough times… because they are coming. I started flipped eye publishing because I thought there were many good writers not being published, but – more importantly – I believed that perhaps one of the reasons that poetry enjoys such poor sales is that poetry books are over-priced. Remembering my motives has been a guide for every major strategic decision we have taken as a company – even when the margins have been challenging.
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2. Ask, ask and learn fast: It is no coincidence that the average business has a shorter lifespan than a cheap breast implant; in spite of all my research I ended up spending more in the first year-and-a-half of flipped eye publishing than I did in the three succeeding years when we published more books. That’s an indication of just how steep the learning curve can be so be prepared to ask designers, printers, distributors, retailers, how things work and the best way to make your budget stretch to meet your objectives.
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3. Pull a good team around you: I believe I have two of the best young poetry editors in the world (in Niall O’Sullivan and Jacob Sam-La Rose) working with me right now – their ears are well-tuned, they have an eye for technique, flippers in the waters of history and fingers on the throb of contemporary culture – they go the extra mile for me and I go the extra mile for them. They also have a myriad of skills beyond editing so it feels like I have a team of seven for the price of two. Side-by-side with them and the best freelancers available, I know we can move mountains of books.
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4. Get what you can for free: I remember paying  £150 to have a barcode generated in 2001 – that was just a cost component in the production of a single title; now, if we work in house, we can have 50 copies of a title produced from scratch with that budget. We generate barcodes for free online with the fantastic online engine at tux.org, we get free fonts from emerging designers at fontspace.com and give them credit. And, in the downturn we are focussing on using what we already have – producing new formats e.g. audio and e-books from content that we already have. It is no fluke that we’ve had less than £55,000 in Arts Council funding in the 10 years we have been running.
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5. Fix up, look sharp: When we started flipped eye publishing, I sat down with a graphic designer and we spoke about the importance of creating iconic looks. It took four books before we came up with the recognisable format we use for our full poetry collections, but by the time we started the mouthmark series, we had imprint identity down to a fine art. The point is, if the books look professionally produced, people take them more seriously as literature – and as fine art! Some of my proudest moments have been at the Brooklyn Book Festival where customers have stopped at our table to buy a whole series because they like the look of our books. Who said poetry can’t be sexy?
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6. A little madness goes a long way: We are a weird little ideas factory at flipped eye mind central. We spoke about full show-choir street advertising in the days before Glee; we let loose pages of poetry fly in the streets of East London; we celebrated our 10,000th book sold with a wild wild party; we set up guerrilla stages on the streets of Brooklyn to appear in the New York Times; we launched our own jazz band to celebrate our eighth anniversary at the Southbank Centre; we wrote lyrics and music for a song called ‘Poetry’; we had an official wine sponsor. And – let’s be frank – who sells full collections of poetry for £5.99 in the UK? But that’s who we are.
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7. Be adventurous and conservative: When we said we were going to start a pamphlet series (mouthmark series) which was specifically a mentoring and development series for poets with a performance background we were really pushing boundaries; now, after tall-lighthouse’s fantastic pilot series with Roddy Lumsden, there is Faber New Poets. Even more satisfying, four of the ten-title mouthmark series have sold in excess of 500 copies and we’ve won a few awards for it too. But, just because you produce great books doesn’t mean you will sell hundreds of copies. Many a small press has drowned because they took a wild punt on one title. To sell that many books with a small-press budget you need your authors to support your marketing efforts, and, as much as I love them, authors will let you down. So, will Waterstone’s buyers who chat at parties and then don’t respond to your follow up e-mails. Be adventurous in what you publish; be conservative in your sales projections – however be flexible enough to respond if sales go through the roof.
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8. Don’t underestimate the value of relationships: One of the things that really helped establish us and get certain authors on board was that we were stocked in Borders in at least six cities most of the time. That came out of my organising a monthly poetry open mike reading for Borders Charing Cross for many years, and, subsequently, a buyer (Caroline Mileham) championing our work. For banking, HSBC have waived several charges for us over the years simply because we communicate with them. Small things, but in publishing, every little helps. Of course, Borders later folded with unpaid invoices from us, but, hey, you can’t always win!
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9. Never lose your faith in your ability to identify talent: If you lose it, retire. Of course, there are basic standards – a writer must be able to spell, pass basic grammar tests and structure a story. But publishers’ choices are made on something that can’t be measured by simple grammar; their perceptions of talent and potential. Without faith in your own weird and wonderful tastes and predilections, your effort is really not worth the weight of a dream.

Now for the serious business. I have set up a page for all of you dying to sponsor me at: http://www.kapipal.com/runningforventure – and, of course, if you want to run and direct people to sponsor the award too you’re very welcome…

There’s a widget below that shows you how terrible I am at raising funds. Have pity for I can be quite pithy and surely that counts for something!

Our own approach at flipped eye (and also with the African Writers’ Evening, which I also coordinate) is to remove the notion of funding from our planning in times of uncertaintly and try to think of how we might be able to sustain ourselves without funding. In line with that, we didn’t apply for funding; instead, we have begun to convert our existing titles to digital formats (something we should have started a while ago), further streamlined our production process to cut costs, and all our fine editors (including me) are working for free while we develop the next generation of extraordinary writers. It’s a huge cut, but we did it ourselves, we expected it and therefore we can live with it. Later, when the dust has settled, we can go back to the Arts Council and perhaps other funders and show them the very real progress we’ve made and how much more just a little investment in our projects can yield. If they say no, we will continue to work in our small way; we will not be in danger of closure because our whole future is based on the hope that funding will come.

Funding’s discontents, or rather non-RFO’s discontents have largely come to see funding as their right and that is no way to run an organisation. You have to work for funding; if you are funded and wish to remain so, you have to be at the very least more dynamic than non-funded organisations, and in truth you should be pushing the boundaries continually to seek more ways in which to enrich the public’s experience of the arts. I can’t say that for many of the RFOs – both those that survived (some organisations survived in spite of being ‘static’ simply because they have become to big to cut. What sweet irony!) and those that were cut – from the Arts Council’s portfolio, so I fully understand and sympathise with the position the Arts Council is in.

So, what am I saying? Nobody deserves funding; it’s something you have to prove yourself/ your organisation worthy of. As PBS board member, I believe that dialogue is the right direction as the PBS can not fulfil its potential with no funding; as a new board member, I intend to play my part by working from within to make the PBS the impactful, dynamic, indeed revolutionary body that it can be. Speaking from the flipped eye headquarters (which is now my living room) I say to all the organisations that fell on the knife, don’t just moan about being cut, start a revolution in your organisation and apply for funding annually or per-project like us – the normal folk.

I wanted to build a company that put effort into pricing books as low as possible so that a greater percentage of disposable income brackets could access them. Not surprisingly, I am a great admirer of Allen Lane, the originator of the Penguin paperbacks initiative in the 1930s who believed that there was a ‘vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price’ and priced the books the same as a pack of cigarettes. Using that price benchmark, it is easy to see why so many publishers have been struggling to sell books in recent years. A pack of twenty cigarettes costs £5.85; the average paperback costs £7.99–8.99.

#FridayFours falls in with my keenness to get books to readers for as low a price as possible. So, in the words of Rakim, now you know who to put your money on go out there and grab a #FridayFours book…

These days, regardless of which store we deliver to, we find that our invoices are paid on time and when books are ordered for specific events, the booksellers promote them well and keep a couple of copies after the event to keep the writer in stock. We have been lucky to have several of our authors on at the Royal Festival Hall and the branch there is exemplary: the communication prior to events is timely, the displays during and after the events are splendid and all signings are well managed. I know no one is asking, but occasionally a good word is just deserved. Well done Foyles!

I do still have my gripes, well, one gripe – the cost of organising readings at the Charing Cross store is exorbitant. A fail-safe killer for small presses – especially ones like flipped eye that love to read!

In the early days of flipped eye publishing I saw every submission as a chance to enhance the experience that most aspiring writers have when they submit work to a publisher. I responded to every submission, telling each writer what I liked and didn’t like about their work, what could be improved easily, who I thought they should read, and what magazines to submit to. It was a tall order, but we were new and I was only editing three writers so I was able to keep up with it. Besides, I had been the submitting writer so many times and was so incensed when editors/agents/magazines who asked you NOT to make simultaneous submissions did not respond. I actually got several writers writing back to thank me – and, of course, submissions ballooned because that was effectively a FREE reading service.

Seven years on, I find myself editing twenty two writers, working with two extra editors and – yes – with no time to respond to all submissions. Admittedly, it crept up on me, so I didn’t actually take steps to let writers know of the changes (I do believe clear communication is the foundation of the contract, regardless of how transient, between editor and writer/aspiring writer), but we have ALWAYS said that we accept simultaneous submissions – after all, if an editor likes your work, they should step up and say so! And we don’t require SAEs, which I maintain are a waste of time – in fact, we prefer initial queries by e-mail.

What we have done now, though (a few years late), is create an auto-response that lets writers know EXACTLY what is likely to happen to their submission – where it goes. And the text reads something like this:

Your submission has been received by flipped eye publishing and will now go through a number of stages. You may or may not get a response depending, primarily, on whether or not your submission makes it beyond our initial readers. During low submission periods we endeavour to respond to all submissions, but we cannot promise this.

The stages are as follows:

1. Your submission is read by our initial readers, who will pick work that is well-structured, edited and presented and forward what they choose to our selection readers. LIKELIHOOD OF RESPONSE IF YOU DON’T MAKE IT PAST THE INITIAL READERS – 12%
2. Your submission is perused by our selection readers who will select work based on originality, style and the priorities of our three editors, sending the chosen work on to specific editors according to their assessment of the work. All fiction submissions will go to Nii Ayikwei Parkes. LIKELIHOOD OF RESPONSE IF YOU DON’T MAKE IT PAST THE SELECTION READERS – 30%
3. Your work is read by one of our three editors who then pick the work they like and share it with the other editors at our editorial meetings (held every six weeks). LIKELIHOOD OF RESPONSE IF YOU DON’T MAKE IT PAST AN EDITOR – 62%
4. Your work is championed by an editor at an editorial meeting. If it is approved, the editor who chose your work will contact you to discuss the possibility of publishing you. LIKELIHOOD OF RESPONSE IF YOU DON’T MAKE IT PAST THE EDITORIAL MEETING – 99%

So, we still love bits of your work – but we can’t always tell you which. We live in crunchy times…

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