I tweeted yesterday that I didn’t want to get drawn on the #dearpublisher discussion that had erupted on Twitter. This was for two reasons: one was that the first tweet I read said that publishers homogenised culture, only publishing ’safe’ books, and are slaves to celebrity. It’s an accusation as common as it is unfounded, as a cursory glance in any bookshop or our book list will tell you.

So that annoyed me, and I didn’t want to use Twitter to vent my annoyance. My lovely followers wouldn’t have liked to see that, and I have an allergy to internet bitching, which is how I would have sounded. I’m just not that guy.

The second reason was that some of the questions and comments, the majority of which were good, relevant, and interesting, couldn’t be sensibly answered in 144 characters, and deserved more space. Well, look-ee here, I’ve got a blog and I’m darn well going to use it. I’ve taken some of the recent, popular #dearpublisher questions and, along with my colleague and co-conspirator @drummondmoir, we have attempted to answer them as best we can. Please note these answers apply only to how we in Windmill Books work. Other publishers do things differently: that’s their bag; this is ours.

Any other questions? Stick them in the comments below, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

@tea_mouse: What sort of stats are you looking for from wordpress bloggers, since we don’t have ‘followers’ #dearpublisher

I don’t look for stats: I look for a well presented, frequently updated blog that shows passion and interest in books. If your blog has five readers, and each of them buys a book because of the review you wrote, then that’s good enough for me.

@Irisheyz77: #dearpublisher please encourage yours authors to comment/email bloggers when they like a review. It gives us the warm fuzzies.

This is a great idea, and I’ll do this, though I’d still want to check with the blog owner first. What gives some people the warm fuzzies gives others the heeby-jeebies!

@glindaharrison Please ensure an author’s backlist titles are out as ebooks. Can’t believe CS Lewis & Wm Golding’s backlist not available. #dearpublisher

We’re currently working on ‘digitising’ both our frontlist (upcoming titles) and our backlist. But given that as a company we have an enormous backlist - stretching back literally decades and decades and comprising many thousands of titles - it’s unfortunately not something we can do instantly. There are other issues involved in terms of quality control, as frontlist titles can be easier and more reliable to convert to the required formats, but backlist titles are a different kettle of fish. Rest assured we’re going as fast as we can, but we don’t want to cut corners as backlist titles are important!

@MJRose #dearpublisher find a way to support every book you publish - no one can buy a book they never heard of, never see, don’t know about.

We agree 100%, and finding a book’s audience - including how many there are of them, the ways that they find out about books, how they communicate, and where they are - is a key part of our jobs. In a lot of cases, our time spent doing this is the most valuable investment that we can put into a book.

@katrinalantznov: #dearpublisher Combine ebooks with hardcovers, but please don’t stop printing books ever. The book is not dead. It just had babies.

There are no plans to stop printing books - they still make up the vast majority of our market and our bookshelves. Indeed at time of writing Ebooks sales make up just 1% of the UK book market. The rise in ebooks heralds an exciting time for publishing, but we haven’t lost sight of what got us where we are in the first place.

@bookladysblog: #dearpublisher I love it when you get to know me & recommend the right books for my blog. Also: catalogs are appreciated.

We always read up on a few blog posts to see what kind of thing a blogger is interested in, as we don’t want to waste anyone’s time with irrelevant books. That doesn’t mean we know for sure that the books we’re sending will definitely get a good review, and in fact I’ve been surprised in the past with reviews where I’ve thought it was definitely going to be positive, and it’s been more mixed.

Currently we don’t produce catalogues, but if you’re a blogger and would appreciate receiving one every 3 months say, drop me a line at windmill@randomhouse.co.uk

@thestorysiren: do you like us to send review links even the not so positive ones? #dearpublisher

Absolutely do send links through. For one thing, it helps us gauge what you like so we can fine tune what we’re sending to for review. And also, I’ll often RT a review even if it’s mixed (though not if it’s terrible), as people often disagree, and a healthy discussion about a book is never a bad thing.

@ChatNoirBooks  seen in #dearpublisher - thinking a book’s price is just printing costs is a bit like thinking your marriage is only worth the certificate.

We couldn’t agree more, and in all honesty we do think about more than just the printing costs! If it was just about printing we’d be printers not publishers.

@CassandraYorgey #dearpublisher, not all authors are cut out for “online presences”. Marketing shouldn’t be part of a writer’s job.

I agree with the first half of your statement. We never tell an author to start a blog/Twitter account unless they have both the time and inclination to keep up both - they know from the off that unless they are in it for the long haul (i.e. way past the publication of their book) then there’s no point. In this respect online marketing is very author led: it’s what they are comfortable and confident with.

The second half of your statement I’d disagree with though, and I know a lot of our authors would too. I think it is an author’s job to help promote their work in some way, both to do justice to all the work they put into the writing in the first place, and to further their career for future books that they hope to publish. The way they do this, of course, entirely depends on what their strengths are, which the publisher always wants to play to, both online and off.

Those black markings made by a vehicle’s wheels when it comes to a shrieking stop on the road - what do you call them?

Skid marks. I always called them that - skid marks. When I was a kid riding bikes with my friends, we used to accelerate and then jam on the brakes to see who could make the longest skid marks. Later, when I began driving a car, I saw skid marks that went on over surreally long distances, or that curved over and went right off the side of the road, or that ended in a scatter of broken plastic and glass.

But in my novel, The Reconstructionist - which mentions a number of such marks - you might notice that they’re never called skid marks.

Instead, those black markings on the road are called tire marks (or tyre marks, in proper British English). When I first began working in the field of accident reconstruction I called them skid marks, and I was quickly corrected. It turns out that not every black mark on the roadway leading to a collision is a skid mark. Some are skid marks, but some are yaw marks, and some are a blend of skid and yaw marks. You have to do some analysis to figure out which is which. But tire mark safely covers all the possibilities.

What’s the difference between a skid mark and a yaw mark? A skid mark is generated by a tire that has stopped turning, usually because the driver is braking. But a yaw mark doesn’t require braking; instead it is caused by a vehicle that is turning (i.e., yawing) hard. While the vehicle turns, the wheels might still be spinning, but they’re turning in one direction while the vehicle is traveling in another direction, so the tires are scraped sideways over the road and leave a trail of black rubber behind.

It turns out that there’s a handy way to determine whether a mark was made by skidding or yawing. Car tires today, of course, are textured with patterns intended to improve traction in foul weather. These patterns will create striations in a tire mark, and when a vehicle skids to a stop without yawing, the striations will run in the same direction as the tire mark. But if the tire mark was created by a yawing vehicle, the striations will be perpendicular to the direction of the tire mark. The tire mark will look as if it were made by many small back and forth brush strokes.

You might suppose that you could also tell a skid mark from a yaw mark simply by whether the mark runs straight or curves. But, while it’s true that a yaw mark is more likely to curve while a skid mark is more likely to be straight, a vehicle can skid and yaw at the same time, and even a vehicle in pure yaw may move in a very broad arc if it is going at high velocity. In fact, if you can look at the striations in a tire mark and determine that it was in pure yaw, then you can calculate the vehicle’s speed by measuring the radius of the arc and assuming that the frictional forces between the tire and the road were equal to the centrifugal forces on the car. The broader the arc, the faster the vehicle was going.

My novel is about an accident reconstructionist, a man who has spent years analyzing accidents, trying to figure out how they happened. A reconstructionist’s work is full of examination of tiny detail, studying and analyzing tire marks, headlight bulbs, seatbelts, dents and scratch marks, in the service of recreating a few seconds surrounding an accident - an accident that changed lives forever. It always seemed to me that there was a strange juxtaposition between the reconstructionist’s obsessive recreation of a few seconds around a crash and the long arc of the actual lives affected by that crash - the dead, the injured, their family and friends.

The reconstructionist’s approach is analytic and scientific, but ultimately what the reconstructionist is trying to do is develop a narrative that describes the events immediately preceding a crash. So, a reconstruction is a kind of storytelling. But it is a curiously truncated kind of storytelling, a deformed storytelling, because it ignores the before and the after, and it ignores the stories of the lives involved. It examines a moment of crisis in extreme detail, but it decontextualizes the crisis from the humanity of the crisis.

There’s a danger in this; by ignoring the humanity involved in an accident, the work can eat at the soul. It’s a tension that I found fascinating, and that I struggled with when I worked in the field. And while The Reconstructionist is about a number of different things, I always had this tension in mind as I wrote - the juxtaposition of the analysis of a crash with its actual effect on human lives, and how the stress of that juxtaposition can create fissures and spaces in the lives of people absorbed in the reconstructionist’s work. How else, after all, to work out a problem of deformed storytelling, except by telling a story that explores it?

The Reconstructionist by Nick Arvin is out now. Order it from rbooks, Amazon, Play, Waterstone’s, or your local bookshop.

When we published Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey, the buzz around the office told us that we had something special on our hands. We couldn’t have predicted the response when it came out: below is a round-up of the awards mentions and reviews it’s been enjoying:

Awards:

WINNER - 2010 Nielsen BookData Booksellers Choice Award for book that bookseller have most enjoyed handselling

SHORTLIST - Miles Franklin Award

SHORTLIST - Christina Stead Award

Reviews:

‘Catcher in the Rye meets To Kill A Mockingbird in a novel that confronts racism, injustice, friendship and the tenderness of first love - as seen by bookish, guileless, 13-year-old Charile Bucktin, led astray by the intriguing, dangerous, eponymous outcast, Jasper Jones’ Easy Living

‘Terrific…this is an enthralling novel that invites comparison with Mark Twain and isn’t found wanting. Silvey is able to switch the mood from the tragic to the hilarious in an instant’ Mail on Sunday

‘A finely crafted novel that deals with friendship, racism and social ostracism … Saluting To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Silvey movingly explores the stifling secrets that lurk behind the most ordinary of facades’ Marie Claire

‘Silvey’s story of a claustrophobic Australian mining town and two of its native, naïve sons is suspenseful, charming and very readable indeed’ Mslexia

From the blogs:

‘A joy to read and has definitely been one of my favorite reads this year!’ - The Little Reader

‘One of my favourite reads of the year so far’ Follow the Thread

‘All I can say is that when I woke this morning and realised I’d finished the book last night, and that I wasn’t going on my usual visit to Corrigan over my cornflakes, I felt I was mourning a good friend’ Gillian E Hamer

‘An engrossing novel’ The Book Bag

Craig Silvey has written in a way that is accessible to young and old. It’s descriptive, captivating and thrilling - a book with a long lifespan … READ IT! Giovanna Falcone

Order a copy from us, or through Amazon, Play, Waterstone’s, or at your local bookshop now, or go to the website and find out more!

Author and historian Helen Rappaport will be touring around the country talking about her writing through 2010. For full details please visit Helen’s official site.