How did you go about finding Lulu. com?
I googled ‘self-publishing website’ I think. Simples.
Are they easy to use? Any problems you encountered?
They’re a very easy service to use, although you have to do everything yourself; though, I’d say that’s no bad thing. You yourself are basically the publisher and copyright holder and they the distributor; all formatting, proof-reading and aesthetic considerations are the responsibility of the writer or artist, or whoever is involved in the pre-publication process. I like to think of it as a record label who have given a band or artist ‘complete creative control’ and don’t meddle with what they produce, but then all the responsibility is on the person publishing their own work; mistakes can remain unchecked and, more sinisterly, certain legalities can be missed due to the lack of a professional editorial process - libel, copyright infringement, plagiarism, that kind of thing, so it can be a pretty rock n roll form of publishing. I believe Lulu does offer certain packages though, in which your work will be gone through by a professional, for a fee.
With Lulu, you can set your own royalties on top of the printing costs and they take 20%; I tend to keep my royalties fairly low so people can afford to buy the books if they so wish - it’s print-on-demand, which makes it all very cost-efficient and quite environmentally friendly, ethically.
You’ve released 5 books on it, what are they each roughly about and the titles?
Seven, actually; ten publications in total. But yes, I have a pentalogy of novels out which I call the Auto-Fiction series. The first, Halcyon Nights, was written really by chance, and grew out of itself, when I was eighteen years old. During my eighteenth year I experienced a few poignant encounters (mostly at night, in pubs) which I wrote about when I got home; I had five short stories with a running thread by the end of the year and they fit neatly together as chapters and thus I had a book. I re-read it recently and it really is the writing of an eighteen-year-old with no clue, but that said, I was aware at the time that it was a developmental instalment in a kunstelrroman that would continue.
Others followed; the next, Auto-Fiction, was more tales from my life that picked up straight from where the previous left off. It’s a book very conscious of its form and I used a lot of experimental techniques in composing it (filmic consuetude, newspaper reportage, self-interview, etc.); it’s the longest of the lot. The last three I wrote in a different order chronologically to how they should appear sequentially. So, the next I wrote was Emperor of the Weirdoes: A Collection of B-sides and Rarities, which is basically a ‘bonus disk’ - deleted scenes that didn’t make it into the other books, but about things which happened at around the same time. Then I wrote The Neon Searchlights (the fourth sequentially), which again sort of happened by chance; it’s all about meeting someone who became a best friend and it’s full of a Kerouacian sense of exuberance and joy (and is my favourite).
Lastly, I completed the third book in the series, Lying By Your Side; a book about the trials of love, which was a very heart-wrenching story to put to paper; it’s written in third person and it seems to have had quite an effect on a lot of people who have read it, which is heart-warming to hear. I compiled the series into two volumes in the end, which are both available from Lulu. I also have two books of poetry: Disparate Measures and Circumstanzas - certain of the poems have been published in various journals now. And finally, the first number of a literary and art magazine, TRASH, of which I am the editor, is available through Lulu; it comprises various pieces of literature from the hip and happening of the local and national scene and art from established artists and newcomers alike… And that makes ten.
And how well they are doing from Lulu.com?
Not too badly, considering I haven’t really ventured into the world of promotion at all. I’ve sold nearly 100 books over the past five years; it’s amazing to think of that dissemination, where are they all now? - I ran into one of my English teachers from secondary school at a beer festival a while ago; he told me he’d written a book on Dickens 20 years prior and it was published properly and it had sold eleven copies to date; so, relatively, I guess I’m doing alright.
What kind of books are they similar to, or are they completely different from others?
I guess the Auto-Fiction books are a kind of Beat literature Renaissance; energetic, frenetic, thinly-veiled real life scenarios transposed from the roads of America in the fifties to the pubs of England in the noughties, there are Gonzo elements too and I certainly tried to mix it up a bit, as I mentioned earlier on, utilising many different writing conventions. For example, in Lying By Your Side I include an analytic essay, a psychological case history and a chapter emulating the eighteen episodes of Joyce’s Ulysses (to describe the events of a Bloomsday in Dublin in ’06). In that, I guess postmodernism is certainly a tag you could affix too. My poetry has been described as ‘continental’ in style, as have my philosophical writings.
Do you have any big influences for your writing?
Very much so; similar to the above, the writers of the Beat Generation; Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Corso, Snyder, even Cassidy, are probably the primary influence on the writing of the AF books, and Hunter S. Thompson too; these were the things I was reading most when I started writing properly, and they’re still hugely influential. The first story in Halcyon Nights actually centres around meeting an old Irish fellow in a pub who told me to read Ulysses - “it will change your life” - and he wasn’t wrong, finding Joyce has had such an effect on my writing and life; I’m even gearing to be scholar in the field of Joyce Studies, and I think, once read, the innovations of his uses of language can’t but have an effect on your subsequent writing… Also very influential is a guy called Francis Kilvert, who was a rector and diarist from my hometown of Chippenham; his diaries are a minor Victorian classic and beautiful to read and very dear to me as we write about the same places often and have lived similar experiences. In poetry I’d state the names Yeats, Shelley, Lorca, Rimbaud, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Lord Rochester and Mallarmé as being my major influences. And in philosophy, Derrida, Hegel, Levinas and Žižek are up there…
Favourite writer?
Hmm, tough one, if not impossible, but if held at gun point, I’d probably just say James Joyce, but that’s probably only because I was being held at gun point.
What's your top 3 books now?
Shish! To choose three… Well, I’ll go for War and Peace by Tolstoy, Ulysses, Joyce and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson.
What's next in your book installment?
Hmm. Having recently finished the Auto-Fiction corpus, which I was six years in writing, I’m taking a bit of a rest, but I do have plans. I may put together three short stories (two of which are in AF) about successive years at the music festival All Tomorrow’s Parties and put that out as a trilogy. I also want to write a book centred around the ten commandments in which ten stories will intercut (first as ten chapters, then ten segments, paragraphs, sentences, etc.) until all of the perpetrators are in an interlocution, which will become a great confession unto God in the mode of St. Augustine; it’ll be called The Odicy, but it may be a while in coming… I’m writing poetry all the time though and I sporadically upload it to one of those blog things, http://circumstanzas.blogspot.com. I’m not very involved with the blogosphere though; I find it a bit distracting.
How have you gained inspiration for this/your works?
Reading really, and the events of life; not always, however, in equal measure. I studied theology for a while, so that’s where my interest in the subject of the book on the commandments comes from I guess; there’s a fascinating wealth to the literature of religion, which has so much to offer, regardless of faith; I am not religious but am deeply fascinated by the canons of world religions and see them as integral to decoding literature, as well as being an inspiration to it.
How often do you write?
I go through bouts of writing up to ten or so poems a day, punctuated by weeks of nothingness. If I’m working on a project, say a novel, sometimes I feel the need to write and I can’t do anything else, sometimes I feel I need to make myself write otherwise it won’t get done. When I’ve been working in dull jobs, such as at a call centre, I tend to find myself writing on scrap paper whilst going through the repetitive motions that the job requires; that makes for interesting results, in that the material is usually quite immediate and vibrant…
Would you recommended self-publishing? And if so, how would they go about it?
It’s good as a launch pad I think. Sometimes I think I’ve been lazy in not peddling my stuff to every publishing house under the sun, but at other times I think the medium’s given me the chance put out something very organic and has allowed me to make errors from which I have learned, and to refine my style without interference and without becoming hackneyed … So, I would recommend it. And it’s very easy to do, just log on, upload and publish; three clicks… The medium of print-on-demand self-publishing was very new when I first started and still is really, so in some ways it’s at the cusp of the modern underground movement in literature; some surprising and original stuff might come through that could challenge the dinosaurs that populate the bestseller lists - for literary scouts it may be the place to watch.
asking the questions: Josh Stanton.
