I don’t like crowdfunding books.
I don’t like the necessity it creates of going on the internet to repeatedly remind people about the book I’m crowdfunding. I don’t like trying to devise ways to hoodwink the algorithm into showing the book to everyone who might want to know about it. I don’t like asking people to put their hard-earned money towards something that doesn’t yet exist. I don’t like promising people how good the book will be… even when I know it’s already the best thing I’ve ever written. I don’t even like that I’m posting this newsletter, which - a few paragraphs below - does actually feature some actual writing, but is at root another way to try to get my book crowdfunded. I wince every time I do all these things. They all seem an affront to the way I was brought up and to my core belief about the best and most nourishing way to live a creative life, which is to quietly put everything you’ve got into creating something without being a tiresome avaricious foghorn about it then move directly onto quietly putting everything you’ve got into creating something else.
But I love having crowdfunded a book.
I love the way it involves my readers, as more traditional methods of publishing never quite could, the way it adds an extra layer to the conversation that a book always is between authors and readers. I love the way it feels like a middle finger extended to the amorphous publishing industry entity that still, even in 2024, for a large part decides books can only be published if they’re like other books that have already sold lots of copies or that books have to be written by the shiny people who live inside primetime TV or famous comedians in their spare time or people in London who have lots of celebrity author friends who might be able to click their fingers and help a book succeed. Most of all, I love the way it enables me to write books. And not just any books, but the books that are most exciting and fulfilling for me to write, the books that would thrash around my head and refuse to let me rest if I didn’t write them. And the way that when I do, I discover to my surprise that I genuinely thrive on the pressure of the knowledge that people have already funded them, that readers of my previous books possess that level of trust in me.
We are just over halfway there.
I want to say a massive thank you to everyone who has helped so far. You are so kind and generous. I’m hoping, with a little push, that we might be able to reach 100% by the weekend. If you missed my previous newsletter, you can read a bit more about Everything Will Swallow You here, including an extract, and here is the link to support its publication by ordering a copy. Crucially, I also wanted to let you know that until midnight tonight you can get 20% off the cover price of a hardback - a signed one, if you wish - by using the code KARL20.
I confessed to my partner yesterday that I was in an anxious mood, owing to the fact that this book seems a little slower edging towards its target than its predecessors have been.
“But more than 200 people!” she said. “Imagine all those people standing outside our house, right now. Every one of them wants to read it. That’s flipping amazing.”
She’s right. It’s really flipping amazing.
Crowdfunding my books changed my life. In 2017, instead of sending 21st-Century Yokel to one of the traditional publishers who’d put out my previous work, I asked Unbound to help me crowdfund it on their website. I had no idea whether the experiment would work, but it reached its total in just over seven hours: a record, at the time. Since then I’ve crowdfunded two more non-fiction books with them, one collection of short stories and two novels, and I am hoping that novel three is soon set to join that cheerful gang. These are the books I’m most proud of by far. There’s plenty about my earlier eight books I’m proud of too, but I wouldn’t especially care if they never sold another copy. It’s these latest seven that are truly, fully me. The process of publishing them, as well as writing them, has made me a far more confident, less inhibited writer and a stronger, happier, more fulfilled person.
I took some 45rpm records to a pub last night and played them to a room full of people. This is what a couple of them sounded like:
Music - especially music with some element of the psychedelic - always feeds into my books in an important way, even though I am only writing about it in them sporadically. I can’t quite state the way it works as clearly as I could if I was talking about the way another writer or a place or a specific event had influenced my work. Maybe I’m a little like one of those farming folk in a time before science who believes in a proverb or piece of folk wisdom that might not be true but the sheer strength of his belief in it helps his crops and animals survive. Having a lost psych classic or fifty around as I write doesn’t alter my writing in any way I can pinpoint that won’t sound abstract and folksily questionable. But my belief in their ageless power could not be stronger.
I am loving the opportunity that writing and researching Everything Will Swallow You has been giving me to explore the magical and oft-misunderstood (including, once upon a time, by me) county of Dorset. Just under two years ago, for example, I walked the entire perimeter of the Isle Of Portland. Here’s what I wrote about it afterwards:
“You did that,” said Pete, pointing at the headless rabbit having the last of its throat torn out by jackdaws. “I told you you shouldn’t have said it. It was you! I bet you feel terrible now.” We were on the Isle of Portland, in South Dorset, and as we walked beside a school we’d initially suspected was yet another of the isle’s prisons, with bright blue skies and unprotected sheer drops to our left, and crisps in our mouths that weren’t available outside America back in 1996, I thought about how different this was to where we first met, 26 years ago, which was on a plane to New York, where Pete and I had been commissioned by a music paper to respectively photograph and interview a band while staying in a famous bohemian building, but then I thought about how the view to our left now wasn’t a lot different to the view out the window to our left as we first got acquainted on that equally beautiful day: the fiercest of sunshine reflecting on swirled deep blues and fluffy whites, just off the west coast. Also Pete was living in London back then and a thing they say about Portland is that there’s more of Portland in London than there is in Portland, owing to the amount of the island’s stone – and yes let’s call it an island, rather than an isle, because even though it’s connected to mainland Dorset by a thin strip of Chesil Beach’s shingle, it very much retains the character of an island – that’s been quarried and taken away to the capital since Inigo Jones first discovered its potential as building material in the early 1600s. Not quite as glamorous as staying in the Chelsea Hotel, though, perhaps, walking on Portland. Unless you find glamour in exploring a grey, almost totally treeless landscape of fenced-off, abandoned eastern European-looking churches, correctional institutions, monotonous post-war terraces and forlorn wallabies enclosed behind wire alongside assorted chunks of broken concrete.
All I’d said was “rabbit”. But that’s the one word you don’t say on Portland. “Bunnies” is fine. “Underground mutton” and “long-eared furry things” are also apparently frequently-employed tolerable variations. But not “rabbits”. I’d been warned beforehand so I had no excuse. The superstition apparently dates from around a century ago when quarry workers would blame the long-eared furry things for landslides and rock falls, many of which had led to the death of their friends and colleagues. If a rabbit was seen, workers would often be sent home for the day. People still know the dangers and take the appropriate precautions. When the Wallace And Gromit film The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit was released in 2005 the dreaded word was left out of advertising posters on the island, with the phrase “Something Bunny Is Going On” being used as a stand-in. And now look what I’d gone and done, in my heedless, flippant arrogance.
Before we saw the deceased long-eared furry thing, Pete and I had been walking on the island for over three hours and hadn’t seen any other underground mutton, alive or dead. We had, however, in addition to the melancholic wallabies, met alpacas, chickens, shire horses, jackdaws, a pair of extremely confrontational geese, four of the biggest rats I’ve ever seen and – on the steps down to Ope Cove – a surprisingly personable March lizard, possibly looking for another March lizard to box with, as March lizards do, in their infamous spring mating rituals, which so many artists and printmakers have depicted in their work. The unpredictable nature of the animal life here mirrored that of the architecture and terrain. You never know what’s around the corner on Portland. One moment on the east coast I felt like I was on a back street in one of Stoke On Trent’s more affordable suburbs. A few minutes later, after passing a bowling green and various sunken rectangles of land resembling primitive subterranean football stadiums, Pete and I found ourselves in a mysterious landslip, surrounded by ancient gravestones, with a castle above us and an inviting turquoise swimming beach below. The west coast, meanwhile, is part central Bradford, part Greek island. Walking the circumference of the island is like reading a novel whose plot will repeatedly confound you every time you think you have the author’s motives sussed. The place is total Juxtapositionland, Double-Edged Sword City. On one edge of the sword, for the children who live here: “This school I am at does quite well in the league tables but feels slightly oppressive and penitential.” On the other: “Look at that fucking incredible coastline just outside the window!” As Pete and I talked about our contrasting experiences of growing up – the parts of it we thought were pedestrian at the time and didn’t realise were unique and the parts of it we thought were weird at the time and didn’t realise were universal – we wondered what life might be like on this island for a teenager. Sitting on a man-made stone archway close to the cliff edge as the sun goes down, sharing a spliff with the class bad boy. Experiencing your first kiss next to the lighthouse at sunset after a romantic walk from a travertine flow stone, looking out on an unbroken line of water that goes all the way to South America. “Normal,” you’d perhaps think at the time. “Boring,” you might conclude of this hollowed out ammonite paradise you live on, this land of dispiriting concrete and weirdly small sheep and grey pre-evacuatory ambience, seamed with the sparkling and spectacular, circled by racing, merciless tides which separate you from what other people think of as life.
In Emma Tennant’s atmospheric, hard-to-forget novel Queen Of Stones, a party of Dorset teenagers get lost on a charity walk in the thickest fog ever recorded in the region and go progressively feral, acting out sacrificial rituals in the dark places beneath the clifftops we have been carefully treading. It makes total sense that Tennant chose to set those final scenes on Portland, and even more now I’ve actually been there. Gazing east, as I have drip-dried from swims off the dry cabbagey shores of Chesil Beach during the last few summers, I would never have guessed how utterly other the island is. What I want to know is: why had I not been told about its character by anyone, in my many years living in the South West? Have I not made it quite clear enough how drawn I am to culturally muddled stretches of post-industrial coastal landscape, rife with folklore? I was under the impression that I had but maybe I’ll be more lucid about the matter in future. Thomas Hardy described Portland’s inhabitants as “curious and well nigh distinct people, cherishing strange beliefs and singular customs.” In 1906’s Highways And Byways In Dorset Sir Frederick Reeves called it “a dismal heap of stone standing out into sea, with the ravenous, ship-destroying ‘race’ in front of it.” Pete and I saw the place on the most glorious of spring days, and it was still face-slappingly, artlessly bleak. The primroses currently sprouting on grassy banks all over the south west were conspicuously absent. Any tree we saw had the slight look of having wandered here by mistake. What is Portland like in actual Weather? How would we have felt then, stumbling across the long-eared furry thing: the most viscerally dead of dead animals I have ever seen, even deader than the deadest dusty pelt on the side of a country lane? How different would it have been then, trying to find our way back to the car just to the east of that, where the sculptures in the rock are reminiscent of a brutal forgotten religion? How would we have dealt with the part of the path just after that, which just falls away, down the cliff, into the waves, with virtually zero warning? We laughed about the way my complacent chatter had ushered in the terrifying dead thing we saw in that way people do sometimes laugh at silly supersitions, but the laughter was a protective blanket of sorts, and there was a ragged edge to it which flapped in the clifftop breeze, and if I make a trip to Portland again, as I very much hope I will, I will be carefully avoiding the “R” word for its duration.
I notice that I’ve gained a little rush of new subscribers in recent days. In case any of you didn’t know, I’m currently offering a big discount on full annual paid subscriptions, and everyone who subscribes, wherever they happen to be, gets two signed books by me - my novel Villager, plus one of my other recent ones, chosen at random - PLUS a small original piece of my mum’s art.
Some other pieces you might have missed:
How Julian Cope Licked My Face and Hypnotised Me Into An Occult Life On The Margins of Society
All this is true. I am there fishing lots on the east coast. I once heard a row in the Salvation Army charity shop in Easton that went:
Geoff: 'I shot some rabbits on Doug's farm near Overton last week.'
Shopkeeper: 'Geoff, you can't say that here and you know it.'
Geoff: 'Sorry, but you know I love to eat rabbit...'
Shopkeeper: 'I am not joking, Geoff, you stop that now or you leave. You're not on the mainland now.'
Geoff: 'Sorry, sorry...'
I can imagine the anxiety and awkwardness of crowdfunding as it feels more direct than having intermediaries deal with the ‘capitalist’ part of the creative process. But I like crowdfunded books for two major reasons - firstly that it feels like I’m more connected to the project and actually helping it exist, which is motivating as I also try to create things, and secondly I love that they take the money now so when it arrives it’s like a present for my future self. Preorders are fine and all, but they then take the money when they are about to send it, which can sometimes take a sorry looking bank balance by unfortunate surprise!
Looking forward to both your new books, and hope you have as much fun writing them as I know I will reading them ☺️