SALT IN CHOPPY WATERS

Yesterday Chris Hamilton-Emery, director of Salt publishing, posted the message below on his Facebook profile. The recession has hit books sales badly despite many people's claims that we are all returning to life's simpler pleasures like reading, now that we are (allegedly) too broke to fly to Barbados every other week-end. (When did we ever, anyway?!)

Salt need cashflow NOW in order to continue their work. They make beautiful, literary books. They have eight short fiction collections on the Cork City - Frank O'Connor 2009 longlist, among many other achievements. If you love books (and I know you do!!) please support them.

My personal interest in Salt's fortunes is obvious: they are publishing my next book, Nude. That aside, they really, really do wonderful work on behalf of short story writers and poets and they deserve sales.

So, please, readers, if you can, go to their site and buy one Salt book today and help them stay afloat.
Salt's website is HERE.

Chris's statement:

As many of you will know, Jen and I have been struggling to keep Salt moving since June last year when the economic downturn began to affect our press. Our three year funding ends this year: we've £4,000 due from Arts Council England in a final payment, but cannot apply through Grants for the Arts for further funding for Salt's operations. Spring sales were down nearly 80% on the previous year, and despite April's much improved trading, the past twelve months has left us with a budget deficit of over £55,000. It's proving to be a very big hole and we're having to take some drastic measures to save our business.

Here's how you can help us to save Salt and all our work with hundreds of authors around the world.

JUST ONE BOOK

1. Please buy just one book, right now. We don't mind from where, you can buy it from us or from Amazon, your local shop or megastore, online or offline. If you buy just one book now, you'll help to save Salt. Timing is absolutely everything here. We need cash now to stay afloat. If you love literature, help keep it alive. All it takes is just one book sale. Go to our online store and help us keep going.

2. Share this note on your profile. Tell your friends. If we can spread the word about our cash crisis, we can hopefully find more sales and save our literary publishing. Remember it's just one book, that's all it takes to save us. Please do it now.

With my best wishes to everyone
Chris
Director
Salt Publishing

LIBRARY CUTS AFFECTING AUTHORS

Publishers and authors are suffering because of cuts to purchases of their books by Irish public libraries, according to a recent Irish Times report.

The budget for new books in Galway city and county’s 30 libraries was cut from €550,000 to €100,000 at the start of the year, according to the Library Council. That's a staggering cut and a real blow to the libraries who do such a fantastic job.

From the article by Genevieve Carberry:

Galway Library has had to limit daily newspapers mainly to city branches and cut the number of new books to one between all branches, Maureen Moran, senior executive librarian at Galway Library, said yesterday. She said Galway libraries were busier than ever as “it is one of the few places you can go now without spending any money”.

ONE copy of each new book between ALL branches!!!! Oh, my God...

ARTS MINISTER ON BUDGET CUTS TO THE ARTS

Here are the official comments on the Supplementary Budget, April 2009, by Martin Cullen TD, Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism.

Minister Cullen said: “The Arts, Sport and Tourism sectors are important drivers within the economy - both as contributors to economic growth and to employment levels. One fifth of the working force in our country earn their living from tourism/hospitality, arts and sports. Between them they generate almost six and half billion euro in foreign currency earnings per year.”

With particular reference to Arts and Culture the statement said:

Expenditure in relation to the Arts, Culture and Film sector has reduced by €41m from €221m in 2008 to €180m in 2009, a reduction of 18.5%. Within this, the reduction in relation to current expenditure has been 6% while the reduction in relation to capital expenditure has been 42%, owing primarily to the completion of once off major capital projects such as the Wexford Festival Opera House and the Gate Theatre extension.

The Minister said: “The bulk of the cuts in this sector have been concentrated into capital expenditure to protect day to day expenditure and ensure venues remain open, job losses are minimised and the contribution to cultural tourism enhanced." Pre 2009 commitments in respect of local arts and culture (capital) infrastructure will be honoured. Current funding to the Arts Council, the state agency which develops and supports the arts in Ireland will be confirmed on the publication of the Revised Estimates.

OK. 'Cultural Tourism' is all very well but day-to-day, your average living, breathing, working individual artist is not that concerned with Cultural Tourism. She is concerned with having the time and space to practice her art and with, somehow, earning a living from it. Swinging cuts in the Arts Sector are not good for that individual artist.

I think the Arts needs a department of its own and should not be lumped in with Tourism, which has much more commercial concerns. Or with Sport, which gets ENORMOUS corporate sponsorship and media coverage.

NO ARTS CO DOSH FOR ME - BOO HOO

Well, no Arts Council Bursary for me again in this new round-up. I'm really disappointed. I fit their criteria: full time artist, always working, being published, in need of financial assistance. And although I was shortlisted this time, I didn't make the cut. With my family expanding, I really hoped the pressure would be off me for a while to scramble about looking for ways to earn. There's only so many readings a girl gets to do (and at an average fee of €250, they're hardly the stuff of high earnings.) It's no wonder I don't write much new stuff anymore: I'm constantly looking for other forms of writing work: writing articles, translating, teaching workshops, judging lit comps, residencies etc. But soon (with a new addition to the family) I will have less time and freedom than ever for gadding about the country to give workshops, readings etc. It's hard to know what to try next. I did get a bursary in 2004 and it was a Godsend; I eked it out and made it last for over a year. I sometimes joke that I will be the only writer/vegetarian flipping burgers in Supermac's. Thank God there are four of them in the town I live in because, at this rate, I'll need to go and work there.

I wonder sometimes is it because I am not with a big publisher that the Arts Co don't give me a bursary? Both my publishers - Arlen House and Salt - are small operations, publishing books for the absolute love of literature, hopeful of a profit. But, generally, their writers don't earn advances or pots of money by being published by them. Both houses produce beautiful, literate, readable works but both fight very hard to survive in the commercial publishing world. Their writers are delighted to be published by such caring publishers, but they won't live off their earnings and neither will the publishers themselves. They rely a lot on funding and, without it, things get very hard.

Is it Arts Co policy, I wonder, to only support the already supported i.e. those with big publishers who can promote their work endlessly, or those already earning through uni jobs, long residencies etc.?

Last night, at the launch of the Cúirt brochure, Theo Dorgan lamented the loss of funding to the Arts Council. They, he said, have had to make cuts because they themselves have been cut. I understand this. But, for some reason, literature always seems to me like the poor relation in funding matters.

Theo said: 'The arts matter. Politicians need to understand this.' He also urged us - the artists - to take matters into our own hands. He called on us to contact Arts Minister Martin Cullen and ask him for a reversal of the €8.5 million budget cut to the Arts. I, for one, will be doing just that.

[p.s. The Cúirt line-up is fantastic this year: Joseph O'Neill, Carol Ann Duffy, Claire Keegan, Leontia Flynn, Aidan Higgins, Petina Gappah, Helen Simpson etc. etc. Go, enjoy!]

WESTERN WRITERS' CENTRE FUNDING CUT

In another bizarre move, which deals a further belly-blow to literature in this country, The Arts Council have removed all funding from the Western Writers' Centre, Ionad Scribhneoiri Chaitlín Maude, in Galway. The Centre has been in operation as the only Writers' Centre West of the Shannon for almost seven years (I worked there for a couple of years) and has provided workshops, readings, a website, a newsletter - 'The Word Tree' - and were the first to organise a writers' residence in a Galway hospital (I worked on poetry and memoir with elderly patients in Merlin Park).

Among a lot more, they also run an annual festival, 'The Forge at Gort' which I attended and thoroughly enjoyed last year.

Their Arts Council grant of €10,000 enabled them to plan forward and continue to develop the Centre. Now it's gone. Please take the time to add your name to their petition calling for reinstatement of Arts Council Funding here.