They say everyone has got a book in them. But for those that attempt to write a book the road to it’s release can be a long and desperately frustrating one. But it seems more and more people are yearning to become writers. The Internet has served as a brilliantly democratic tool in this respect. Just as the X Factor has convinced people that anyone can be a pop star, so the explosion of on-line blogs, diaries and message boards have provided ordinary non-academic people with an instant outlet for their words and ideas and for some bringing huge commercial huge success. This is very obviously a very good thing. Only trouble is, outside of cyber-space, books written by ordinary people don’t generally get published. And the books offered to ordinary readers are from a very narrow shelf indeed.
Go into your local Asda and you’ll find the same books repeated over and over again in slightly different jackets. The story of a neglected child; the adventures of a football hooligan/gangster/murderer; the ghost-written life story of a twenty three year old Reality TV Show winner, hastily cut n’ pasted together before the second hand ticks swiftly down on their fifteen minutes of fame. In 2008, most publishing is so formulaic it makes painting by numbers look like a finely honed craft.
This is a fact that was not lost on one Mick McCann of Armley, Leeds, Yorkshire. In 2006 Mick had written a book called “Coming Out As A Bowie Fan in Leeds, Yorkshire England” – a picaresque biography of an anonymous young man who, inspired by the glamorous androgyny of the early seventies, decided to live his life as though he was a superstar. Having put the last stop on his “memoirs of a punk romantic’ McCann set about finding a publisher. He trawled the Internet for a likely home for his book and selected one or two who he felt would be receptive to such a work. The response was less encouraging. In fact, it was non-existent.
So, being a survivor of the late seventies, Mick did what any self-respecting literary punk rocker would do. He decided to Do It Himself. But after looking into the logistics of self-publishing he realised he couldn’t afford to pay for the printing of two thousand books that no-one had ever heard of and would therefore probably not buy. So McCann investigated route number three – Print On Demand: “The beauty of POD is that you can print any amount from a single copy to a million. To print one copy would be quite expensive but if you can sell 30 to 40 books you can break even. If Amazon gets an order for one copy of a book that single copy is then printed out and shipped and should reach the customer within 7-10 days.”
So Mick start putting himself about on the internet; in chat rooms, message boards, discussion groups – anywhere he felt there would be a market for his book. A book that didn’t actually exist yet. After covering his initial costs by selling to family and friends the subsequent sales took him into profit and McCann was in a position to start his own Publishing House. And he decided to call it Armley Press. “Punk Publishing” is the term Mick McCann uses for the ethic behind his operation: “Punk Publishing for me sums up what Armley Press is all about - it’s independent, championing unorthodox voices, a “get out and do it” attitude, as opposed to asking someone else’s permission”
With this attitude and methodology Mick has sold over a thousand copies of “Coming Out As A Bowie Fan In Leeds Yorkshire England”. Encouraged by this, Armley Press set about their next project. The criteria was to find a book that shared the same characteristics as “Coming Out …”, i.e., gritty social realism with a local flavour, and laced with large dollops of humour. The result was a taut thriller by another Leeds writer called John Lake; the newly released “Hot Knife – Love Bullets and Revenge in Leeds, Yorkshire England” Lake actually had an agent at the time, but saw the local left-field appeal of Armley Press as being more sympathetic to his position as a regional writer: “There’s a general perception, even in the mainstream press, that the major publishers will only back celebrity books and the London literary mafia. I’ve had publishers tell me my book was great but they wouldn’t invest in an unknown right now.”
For it’s creator, Armley Press is all about having a sensibility that’s as strong and as distinctive as the writers it champions. As well as being fiercely local and independent, its Print On Demand method also incorporates a strong ecological stance. Mick McCann: “It saves on paper, there's little wastage printing copies that go unsold and get pulped. You don't waste energy transporting thousand of heavy books. The only petrol used is in delivering it to the customer, as it only becomes a real object when sent to a person in the real world.”
So if you’re in the business of writing down words that you want other people to read, don’t bother asking permission from someone in London; get out and do it yourself . There’s a literary revolution happening right now in Leeds, Yorkshire, England.
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© Words – Oscar De Paul /ZANI
