The workload tends to be a maximum of two manuscripts a month for fiction and four a month for poetry. We are recruiting a reader for non-fiction for the first time as we develop a popular culture list so we don’t know what the load is likely to be. If you would like to be a reader, please prepare a book report – using the rough guidelines below: for prose fiction or non-fiction (2 pages) or poetry (1 page) and send it to use at books [at] flippedeye [dot] net.

[Guidelines] For fiction, your book report should include a plot outline, a critical assessment and an overall recommendation. For non-fiction you should give an overview of the book’s subject and argument, an assessment of the author’s authority and the uniqueness of the approach, some commentary on prose style and suitability for a general audience, and an overall recommendation. Poetry reports can focus on just the first eight poems of a chosen book and should include some commentary on the originality and appeal of the writer’s ideas and perspectives, the success or failure of the use of form to complement content, prosody, style (e.g. formal, experimental) and subject range/depth.

[What's Next?] If you are selected, you will be sent some guidelines outlining our in-house format for reader’s reports and then you will be sent work fortnightly or monthly depending on workload. You’ll also be sent a couple of our books for your library. When you’re done, you’ll also have one of our great references at hand whenever you need one.

DEADLINE: August 15, 2011

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.

The original essay was delivered as a lecture for Writers Centre Norwich

“Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.” — James Baldwin (from Nobody Knows My Name)

I introduce this short lit-byte with James Baldwin’s quote because I believe that if we read a good poem openly, it always changes us – unfortunately, we often don’t open ourselves to the experience of a poem if we can’t immediately make sense of it, or it doesn’t fit in with our conception of ‘traditional’ poetry. To my mind, when reading a poem, we must remember that poetry works in tandem with its environment and that environment includes you – the reader. Just as the sensation of running is strongly linked to the world around the runner (the temperature, humidity etc. affect how the run feels), so the experience of a poem is linked to the world around the reader. Words are triggers and carry meanings well beyond the scope of the dictionary. A reader or listener who has lost someone close to them whose favourite word was ‘blossom’ will react very differently to an encounter with the word in a poem than someone who does not have that personal history. This indefinable human element is one of the key reasons why one has to let oneself and others develop their own relationship with a poem before imposing opinions. Beyond text there is sound, and the internet offers us a unique opportunity to bring poems alive by playing videos of poets reading their own work – allowing comparisons between performance and representation on the page. More importantly, it is another way to experience poetry, to engage with the feelings that poetry evokes.

Watching a child learn language is probably the best instruction of what engaging with poetry should be like; it may take ages for the meaning to become clear to us, but it should not stop us enjoying it. Children begin to use words that they like the sound of long before the meanings become clear to them, and they create beautiful juxtapositions by doing so. It also means that we can engage them with what seems like nonsense poetry and they will make their own sense of it, whereas an adult might seek to draw a specific meaning from the work. This search for meaning is what our educational systems teach us to do, so in a way I guess I am suggesting that the reading of poetry must be, to some degree, counter to what we’ve been taught; it must deviate from the obsession with logic and fact. Indeed, one of our leading contemporary poets, Don Paterson remarked on this in a recent article in the Guardian discussing his re-reading of Shakespeare’s sonnets. He makes a distinction between a ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ (the analytical kind we tend to do in school) reading of poetry, saying:

“a primary reading doesn’t have to articulate its findings. It engages with the poem directly, as a piece of trustworthy human discourse – which doesn’t sound too revolutionary, but the truth is that many readers don’t feel like that about poetry any more, and often start with: “But what does it all mean?” on the assumption that “that’s how you read poetry”.

Essentially, simple appreciation of the beauty of ideas and language is often lost.

I often think that the moment we stop running in corridors is the moment we need to make a conscious effort not to be too analytical when we first encounter a poem. There is something about that abandon, the possibility of bumping into someone, the acute alertness that aids us if we have to swerve or stop suddenly, that contains all the breathless quests that poetry emerges from. The human and the environment, the traveller and the land, the lover and the terrain of sentiment, the child and the family tree – we must run through it all with no harness, no fear. Poetry is an act of faith.

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!