mentalist (performed live at the Hammer and Tongue slam Oxford 2012 grand final)

My poem about the effects of the government's workfare scheme on those with mental health disabilities, performed at the Oxford Hammer and Tongue final on June 12th where I was lucky enough for it to be the 2nd highest scoring of the 16 poems in the first round. Any shares or pointing campaigners or politicians to it would be hugely appreciated - the URL is here I hope you enjoy it :)
 

What Do you Stand For

(I'm delighted to be guest posting over at teh Alliance of Independent Authors' Self-publishing advice blog)
 
I get why writers resent the question: “What do you stand for?” You can understand it in two ways. First, it sounds like a segue into a discussion of branding and marketing, and both of those are somewhat distasteful topics. And in a way it is about this. In a way.
Second, many of us feel that what we write and who we are are two fundamentally

different things, and asking a writing “what do you stand for?” feels like it’s eroding that essential boundary between the private and the public.
I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable (ah, well, I think we know that’s a lie – a lot of us *need* to be made to feel uncomfortable, especially when it comes to art. But not in a bad way!) but I want to throw some things out there to go away and think about. I will be talking about all of them in some detail over the coming weeks either here or at my new blog The Cynical Self-publisher. For now, I’ll leave it at concrete suggestions and hinted reasons and hope to get you thinking:
 ...
(read the complete article here)

Hungerford Bridge at the Hammer and Tongue Final (video)

Performing Hungerford Bridge at the Hammer and Tongue Oxford grand Final. Really really pleased with how it went - huge thanks to James Webster for some very helpful tips.

Finals

(yeah, the whole I'm on Facebook thing)

No, not the exam kind - I'm WAY too decrepit for that. Rather, the poetry slam kind. All the info on the poster. The Facebook event is here. And tix here. I have a feeling I'll need all the support I can get so if you'd like to come and see me reading some utterly new stuff written specially because I don't have a hope of winning but want to enjoy myself do come!!

1000 true fans part 2

The 1000 true fan approach essentially affects two things about your creative life – the things you do and the things you sell. OK, put together, that’s just about everything. Let me put it simply and then get on with some suggestions.

1. Know what it is you want to do
2. Do it the very best you can
3. Know for whom you are doing it and what it is they are looking for
4. Find as many ways as you can to find them, make them fall in love with your work, and make the love affair last by giving them what they want whilst never compromising number 2....

You can read the rest over at my new blog about which I'm very excited because I've been getting round to starting it for years! It's called The Cynical Self-publisher, and it's a self-publishing advice site for people who aren't interested in hard selling or bestselling but who want to do what they love and make great art. Click anywhere on this para...

Performing at Stoke Newington Literary Festival This Weekend

(keep up with all my writerly goings on through my Facebook page)  
Title says it all! It was an amazing show last year - do come along this Sunday :) Here's the gen!

"a brilliant night" (For Books' Sake)

"While ‘The New Libertines’ sounds like a Granta style tag for a new movement, there was too much variety on show for the acts to be pigeonholed – it does appear to be a guarantee of a good night out though" (Workshy Fop) "the most oh-wow-this-is-tops event of 2012" (Fat Roland of Flashtag Manchester) "quite fabulous" (Elizabeth Baines, author of The Birth Machine) "Forget the ennui of the 9-5. Stories of bingo, of sex, knife crime, coagulated time. Performed with passion, physicality and style. Let your bones submerge in this bath of finely spiced voices" (Daily Information, Oxford, on Oxfringe Read Full Review) Tickets are out now for the New Libertines at Stoke Newington Literary Festival on June 3rd at 3pm at the amazing Baby Bath House. CLICK HERE for details and box office - it's just £4 and last year we sold out well in advance so please go and book. We have an incredible line-up for this year with award-winning slam poets and celebrated short fiction writers as well as leading lights of the poetry scene from Manchester, Oxford, London, Milton Keynes, and Stroud. The New Libertines is eight cuts gallery's touring troupe of troubadour tearaways. New Libertines shows follow a very simple principle - there are no headline or support acts - just a taster menu of amazing performance poets and flash fictioneers performing small but perfectly formed sets to open your eyes to a whole dizzying area of dazzling performance. Oh, and live music of the very best kind to frame the night.

(Paul Askew's breathtaking performance at The New Libertines at Chipping Norton Literary Festival)

Danni Antagonist

Danni Antagonist is a performance poet from Milton Keynes.But please don’t hold this against her. She’s also the current Bard of the historic town of StonyStratford, and she tells rhythmic and rhyming stories from the heart. Her firstcollection, “Empty Threats”, will be available soon. Too-occasional updates can be found at: http://stonybard.blogspot.co.uk/and http://antagonistpoet.blogspot.co.uk/

Paul Askew

editor of Ferment, Hammer and Tongue slam winner

Hay Brunsdon

finalist for Gloucestershire Poet Laureate (coming up on August 18th) and co-curator of A Good Old Yarn poetry & textile collective

(Marc Nash [second from right] at one of our first ever shows in London in 2010)

Emily Harrison

winner of the 2010 Tower Poetry Prize

(Dan Holloway at Pow-Wow Literary Festival, Birmingham)

Dan Holloway

Dan Holloway’s debut thriller was voted “favouriteOxfordnovel” by Blackwell’s readers, but he is most often found behind a microphone. He was a winner of Literary Death Match in 2010, runs the literary project eight cuts gallery, and is the MC of The New Libertines.

Marc Nash

Marc Nash is an author of difficult fiction. Formalist and linguistic experimenter. He has 4 books available on Amazon Kindle.

(Clarissa Pabi)

Clarissa Pabi

2010-11 president of Oxford University Poetry Society, Orange Prize judge, MC of FULLPHAT

(Anna Percy at The New Libertines' barnstorming gig at Three Minute Theatre in Manchester's legendary Afflecks)

Anna Percy

Anna Percy is a Manchester based feminist poet, she has been performing around the country for 8 years and completed a creative writing MA at University of Manchester in 2009 her work encompasses love, lust, loss, losing your mind, the pastoral and surreal. www.mostlynocturnalscribbler.wordpress.com

Claire Trevien

author of Low Tide Lottery (Salt Modern Voices) and editor of Sabotage Reviews

(James Purcell Webster)

James Purcell Webster

James Webster is a performance poet, gigging around London, Oxford and Coventry; some of his poetry can be found here (www.websterpoet.wordpress.com) and he tweets poetry at @websterpoet. He is also the only poet in the UK who will text poetry directly to your mobile for free if you email him your name and number here (websterpoet@gmail.com). He loves words, socialism and you. In that order The New Libertine movement, if it can be labelled a movement, stands for human experience in its glorious, messy, complex entirity, and stands against everything that is blank, bleak, and brutal, one dimensional or slick in contemporary culture, especially current literary culture. With roots that spread to burlesque, Beat, fin de siecle France and ecstatic mystics before slapping its influences around the face with a knuckle-dusting of postmodern wit and Modernist anger, New Libertinism is a celebration of light in dark corners, desire in the face of boredom, despair hidden beneath the underskirts of affluence – of everything it means to be human. Writing that serves up the whole of life, in the smallest microcosms maybe, single truths told in single voices, but told in the full – the ugly and the beautiful; the hopeful and the despairing; the angry and the aspiring; that wrings art, words, life itself until they offer up every last secret, every hidden pain, every unexpected and delightful pleasure; that gives life in the full. Free from judgement. Free from taboo. Free from pretence.

Why "How To Self-publish" guides systematically give you the wrong advice: Revisiting 1000 true fans

A couple of years ago, in the earliest nanoseconds of the big Kindle bang as Brian Cox might say, you could barely come across a post about self-publishing that didn’t refer to Kevin Kelly’s seminal article “1000 truefans.” These days, mentions are as scarce as a self-published book in Waterstones.

The idea behind 1000 true fans, and earlier versions of the theory (which Kelly outlines at http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/04/the_case_agains.php), is that it is possible for an artist to make a living wage by building and then looking after a small, dedicated following (in this case 1000, but he is not dogmatic) of people all of whom are willing to pay a relatively small amount for your work on a regular basis.

It’s easy to understand why so little is said about 1000 true fans (as well, I’ll admit, as a lack of case studies of those using the model to earn a living). Post-Kindle (I wonder when we will start saying BK and PK, for all it makes me want to sit down with a whopper and do some freerunning to burn it off), advice to self-publishing writers focuses fairly exclusively on maximising revenue from ebooks (in practice, this usually means talking about Kindle).

In this piece, I want to suggest three key points that most advice in the PK era focuses on, all of which is antithetical to the 1000 true fans model, and then next time I want to reclaim the model, looking at what working by it might look like for writers, and arguing that not only might there be some mileage in the economic aspect of the theory, but that this is a very good way for us as artists to do our art.

1. How-to advice focuses on volume – on how to sell more books. Where this is moderated in some way it is in terms of the relationship between volume and price and how that feds into maximised royalties. There is little place for discussion of how to achieve a fixed or maximum number of sales
2. Advice focuses on how to use charts and algorithms to create exposure for books, effectively looking to hit a sweet spot where sales become self-generating, whereas the 1000 true fans model looks at selling only at a very specific, and fully defined, customer base
3. When how-to advice looks at craft, at standards and doing things better, the focus is on objective criteria – professional editing, formatting, proofreading and cover design, for example – all of which are aimed to please a notional idea of a customer. With 1000 true fans, on the other hand, the artist aims to meet subjective criteria or, rather, a single subjective criterion – pleasing their fans. And not some abstract concept of a fan, but their actual fans.

The thing about each of those dichotomies is that we are so used to a particular mindset we don’t even think of them as dichotomies, as choices – in each case we struggle to see the former as anything but the only option. In brief:

1. Surely we all want to maximise sales, after all we want to make a living (how many times did you read that before you saw it was a glaring non sequitur?)
2. Surely the point of marketing is to maximise the return on your effort, and this means learning to use the most efficient sales generators (well this may be a non sequitur also, and it may be wrong about the purpose of marketing, but what it most definitely is, is mistaken about the most efficient sales generators because its still hung up on measuring volume and not percentage of target audience reached
3. But this is incontrovertible, surely? To rise above the slush we have to present our work professionally. Readers notice. Readers matter. Yes they do matter – your actual readers, the ones who will love your work so much they will buy anything else you write. So give them what they love – maybe that *is* well-punctuated and neatly justified text with no typos. I’d wager it’s not though – stop forming some imaginary ideal of a reader (didn’t that go out when Aristotle slam-dunked Plato?) and look at what your readers want (and also not someone else’s readers, people who would think the only great thing about your book was the punctuation).

Next time I’ll take a look at what a writer’s life might look like if they took the 1000 true fans route, and explore a world of crowdfunding, gigs and merchandise, newsletters and a life without Amazon.