Results from a survey carried out in late 2008 and early 2009 and released by the Arts Audiences project as part of the Arts Attendance in Ireland report show that 2.1 million Irish adults reported buying at least one book in the preceding 12 months.

The project plans to release a second batch of data in August and is calling on interested parties to offer their ‘input about what you would find most useful. Marketing information by artform? More information about websites? Let us know by posting a comment’.

The survey was conducted in Ireland by Kantar Media UK in from October 2008 to April 2009 and involved in depth interviews with over 3,000 participants.

The Arts Audience project is a joint venture by the Arts Council and the Temple Bar Trust.

Ed O’Loughlin And Molly McCloskey are the highest profile of 26 Arts Council Literary Busary Awards announced yesterday. 22 of the busaries went to English language writers and poets while four went to Irish language applicants include Maire Mhac an tSaoi.

O’Loughlin and McCloskey recieved Multi-annual grants, the only two such bursaries awarded to literary applicants. Gerard Fanning received the largest literary bursary this year having been awarded the maximum bursary of €15,000.

The 2010 literary bursaries came to a total of €162,650 (plus €21,000 committed for 2011) of which €30,000 was awarded to Irish language. This represents 18.22% of the €892,295 awarded. The full list of literary bursaries is below.

Successful applicants in other art forms included traditional musician Ciaran Somers; film-makers Agnieszka Grandowicz and Joe Lawlor; dance artists Colin Dunne and Tanya McCrory; and visual artists Clea Van der Grijn and Brendan Earley.

It has been a busy month for Irish Publishing News. So busy we didn’t get a round up post out so here, as a monthly digest, it is! To celebrate the iPad launch in the UK and the forthcoming launch here in July we’ve added a rather nice image from Flickr User Jesus Belzunce.

Lots more to come in June!

Young People Ready To Breathe Life And Arts Into Derelict Buildings
Young people have vowed to transform derelict and unused buildings into vibrant cultural centres – if Nama and local authorities around the country give them the space and the opportunity.
Read more…

Bloomsbury repackages Harry Potter
An interesting decision!
Read more…

Wherever green is worn…
The Most Famous Irish People You’ve Never Heard Of by Colin Murphy gets a great review too!
Read more…

Herstories
And a great review by Sean McMahon for Mná na Héireann: Women Who Shaped Ireland by Nicola Depuis
Read more…

An interview with Colum McCann
This Readdiscovery initiative is interesting!
Read more…

Irish Tapestry
Verbal is a veritable history review treat! A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes by Jonathan Bardon
Read more…

Second City
A quick review of Freedom to Choose: Cork and Party Politics in Ireland 1918-1932 by Micheál Martin
Read more…

Lapwing Publications is a poetry press based in Belfast. It was founded by Dennis and Rene Greig in 1988. Since then it has published some of Ireland’s best known authors. IPN contacted them because they have been partners in Google’s Book program for some time. They have kindly agreed to allow us republish this piece by their co-founder Denis Greig.

So it was back to the failing conventions. One bookshop keeper informed me that ‘we don’t stock pamphlets’ – that was our main output form then. ‘Odd’ I thought as we chatted beside a mountain of poetry pamphlets. Then there was the hide them under the table trick.

I had a great computer programme but the business of setting up a website was torturous. Yes, with a bottomless pocket of cash I could have got ‘someone’ to do the business.

Then along came Google Booksearch Partners project.

Even in the earlier years, we were attracting hundreds of ‘hits’ a week. That meant up to 500 people a week were browsing our listing. Last year 14,000 plus Lapwing publications were browsed and 56,000 plus pages on Google. That is a lot of people reading a lot of poetry. Some titles have been ‘browsed’ between 1000 and 3000 plus times. And although the number of pages that can be accessed is very limited, the Booksearch has become a ‘virtual library’. Necessary now that the barbarians are threatening to close libraries in the UK and the Blackening North.

The Google site also links to major booksellers and resellers. What’s more, it is universally available, it is a worldwide shop window.

Britain and Ireland are feeling the effects of cultural changes, possibly linked or related in GB’s case to the deconstruction of education for the less wealthy children and young people. Related to that is the rise of commercialism where it is a case of quantity counts instead of ‘quality’. Oh yes, the dumb and ghost-written stuff is well produced as machine-made ‘products’ but the literary commercial culture seems to be all about cooks, crooks, tarts and old farts bumping up their pension plans. So ‘kiss and tell’ will sell. Fine, as long as it lasts. The problem is one of confusing public opinion with ‘taste’. Then again a recent study suggests that 5% of poets actually buy poetry books and of those 65% tend to be Heaney titles followed by Simon Armitage. I wonder how ‘they’ worked that out.

However, some 800 bookshops closed in the UK last year alone. Stalinist central buying and high discount levels demanded worked both for and against publishers. For, when people happily added gunge to their lifestyle bric-a-brac, against when the public stopped or cut buying. Why bother when the remainder shops will have the £20 stodge a a few quid a copy. The other pressure has been the simple cost of occupancy. Employers can impose impoverishing regimes on their staff but when it comes to rents, rates and other forms of official robbery, they have no option but to put up or close up. Hughes & Hughes in Ireland seem to have fallen foul of a complex of problems related to occupancy. A certain chainstore in Britain – with an Irish presence – seems to be suffering as well and if rents escalate some places will become unviable.

With Google, the shop window is lit up 24-7 as the cliché goes.

As it is, poetry is a non-commercial venture. Almost 100 years ago, Ezra Pound helped print his own 200 copy edition of Il Lume Spento in Italy. Des O’Grady did likewise!

The market saturation point in Ireland is about 200 to 300 copies and usually a lot less. So, without state grant aid, there would be a lot less published. Granted the overseas market – not Europe I must add – may subsidise the home based business. Gains can be made by farming out work to India and China. Still, it is essential that traditonal publishers continue to be subsidised even if it means the perceived great and good get the lion’s share – at least it is a form of tokenism, a veneer on the masses who don’t read poetry or ‘fine’ literature and the embellishment of icons emerging poets may aspire to emulate.

Distribution tends to be in a few hands so independent bookshops throughout Ireland cannot obtain what distributors do not have on their shelves. The only other alternative is to use the internet to acquire books on order from customers. Yes, the big shops can do that and yes, a Kindle or iPod ebook reader can give access to a load of titles. That is another kind of distribution, the ins and out of which are still wriggling on the floor. Postage and distribution costs are high, so Lapwng offers titles that don’t need toys for boys and girls, simple PDF files and each title at a fraction of hard copy prices.

Finally, which is only a deferred finality, along came freewebs and Adam Rudden, a bright and brilliant young man who put together my attempt at site building, trimmed and polished and continues to develop the Lapwing ‘presence’. He also is making the best use of Google. The changes around us are happening whilst we sleep, ‘measure our lives with coffee spoons’ to paraphrase T.S.Eliot. In the meantime, in the parallel universe of corporate literary culture, retrenchment and a closing of doors is very evident by the cuts in ‘arts’ budgets and the continued Philistine philosophy around literature, if it doesn’t sell dump it. That is what is happening with ‘fine’ literature. It is not a matter of state organisations flooding the ‘industry’ with cash – it is obvious that small publishers and para-literary publications will be ignored. It would be simply a case of the same old song and same old singer blinged up a bit for the modern market. It will certainly not be a case of liberty, equality and fraternity for the establishment’s barricades are well and truly up already.

Dennis Greig

Slides from Eoin Purcell’s Talk on Publishing Day
From the Irish Writers Centre Blog
Read more…

Hachette Ireland Launches Website
Some personal commenet on the Hachette website
Read more…

Printmaking at the National Library of Ireland
Cool!
Read more…

Perusing the Papers
David parses the weekend papers
Read more…

Arts Council: Touring & Dissemination of Work Scheme
Emerging writer covers thenew grant for touring
Read more…

Lee Child Competition
Read More

The cancellation and postponement of several children’s and literary titles due to be published by Mercier Press has been blamed on a reduction in Arts Council funding, the company said today.

The Cork-based firm confirmed comments made yesterday on Twitter by the children’s publishing blogger, David Maybury, whose as yet untitled book was to be published later in 2010.

Confirmation from the company came through an update on Twitter: ‘Regrettably, several literary and children’s projects have been cancelled or postponed at Mercier due to a 40% cut from The Arts Council.’

Mercier Press’ funding was reduced from €32,000 in 2009 to €20,000 in 2010. The Arts Council has had its overall budget reduced by over €8 million compared with the previous year.

In a phone interview, Managing Director of Mercier Press Clodagh Feehan said it was an ‘unfortunate’ situation.

She said the company would be ‘willing to negotiate with authors who felt they had opportunities to publish earlier (than the new dates) elsewhere’ and that they would honour all ‘existing contracts’.

Ms Feehan added that Mercier Press did not wish to damage anyone’s ability to succeed.

She said the company’s ‘focus was on survival’ in difficult economic conditions.

The Head of Literature for the Arts Council, Sarah Bannan, said that ‘some tough decisions had been made’ but that the Council was happy that it ‘didn’t have to discontinue its funding relationship with Mercier Press’.

Mercier Press was one of several of publishers who experienced a drop in Arts Council funding compared with last year. For a full list of the cuts and its impact see our spreadsheet here.

Julian Gough’s State of Irish Literature Address 2010
The post is a fine one, if a bit dismissive!
Read more…

World’s Fair Use Day
Culch.ie discuss World Fair Use Day, a favourite of mine!:
Read more…

Winners of the Writing Spirit Award 2009
Announcing the winners of the Writing Spirit Award
Read more…

You Say You Want A Revolution …
I like Declan’s open discussions, his blog is a must read!
Read more…

Makinson: e-books are the new paperback
Penguin chief say ebooks are the New Paperbacks, I think he’s wrong but …
Read more…

Arts Council Grants
Emerging uses our spreadsheet and ads some context!
Read more…

(Which is to say, I’m in the middle of a novel at the moment… I may be some time.)
Nice note on ideas and writing from Claire Hennesy
Read more…

New Island has launched a new imprint, Little Island, which will publish books for the children and teenage markets. The official launch takes place on 18 March 2010.

Children’s author Siobhán Parkinson is the Publisher and Commissioning Editor of the imprint, which will publish six books in 2010.

The imprint’s list includes two German authors, Burkard Spinnen and Renate Ahrens, who will be published in English for the first time (is it their first time ever being published in English or just these two books).

It also includes two classic Irish fiction titles from Maeve Friel and Mark O’Sullivan and two newly-commissioned books from Jean Flitcroft and Tom O’Neil.

New Island has experienced a 7% drop in its Arts Council funding, which fell from €115,000 in 2009 to €107,000 in 2010.