About the publishers

 

In 2005, the author Trisse Gejl talked to the owner of Amadeo Publishing about her reasons for starting her own publishing company as she was one of the first in Denmark to publish her own books. It is well worth a read:

             

A Four-Year Publishing Odyssey

Af Trisse Gejl

 

Having studied Mozart and his era for ten years, Louise Bugge Laermann wrote a biographical novel about his wife Constanze and sent the manuscript to a publishing house. This was in 1998, and the publishing house was Rosinante. It was also the commencement of what Louise now terms a true publishing odyssey. It is not a story about good and bad guys, even though many would probably recognize both in the story. It is quite simply a true story from the life of a writer.

Louise’s career (or rather careers) had already proved completely unpredictable and multi facetted. She had been a freelance writer for life style magazines, a theatre critic for the provincial press as well as a PR assistant for The Danish Social-Liberal Party at Christiansborg [House of Parliament]. Furthermore, she had run her own antique shop in Copenhagen, Louise’s Antiques, and for the last ten years she had lived in Germany with her German husband while studying the history of arts and civilization, focusing on the position of women throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th century. It was a subject she had given quite a few lectures on by this time, and as she sensed a novel in the making, she enrolled in a three-year writer’s workshop in Düsseldorf. This was in 1988, and it was a web-based course, which was quite advanced for the time, but the teachers were highly qualified professors and it proved extremely efficient.

Off to a Good Start 

In 1998 and back home in Denmark once again, she was finally able to present her extensive manuscript, ‘Constanze Mozart’, to the world. And she was off to a good start. The publishing house Rosinante, was the only one of the four publishers she sent her manuscript to, who treated her ‘in a kind and nice manner’, Louise claims today. ‘I met the editor in her office, and she sent the manuscript to a consultant, who highly recommended it, but insisted that cutbacks and editing was needed. It was as I had expected. I rewrote the manuscript, cut out different bits, edited a little more etc., and then I sent them a new version’, Louise explains.

‘The months passed, I no longer remember exactly how many but it must have been close to six months, before I received the letter of rejection. The editor did, however, enclose a very personal letter, in which she apologized for the long wait, but as the publishing house had to limit their spending, they dared only engage with already established subjects. Shortly afterwards, the publishing house moved to a smaller residence.

In Order to Help Louise, the Editor had Corrected a Few Chapters.

Then Louise sent her manuscript to the publishing house, Borgen. ‘I received an encouraging reply and a very positive statement from their consultant, in which it said that naturally this novel ought to be published and would I meet with them in December, which was two weeks later, in order to talk about the necessary revisions of the manuscript?

Unfortunately fate had it that my stepmother, who suffered from dementia, was granted a long awaited place in a nursing home, and she had to move in before Christmas or they would give her place to another poor soul suffering dementia. So I postponed my meeting with the editor at Borgen until January’, Louise continues from her home in the North of Zealand, where the autumn sun reflects in the dew on the spider webs outside her windows and where the table is layered with several copies of ‘Constanze’ as well as Louise’s other books, including the first part of a trilogy, ‘Desdemon’s Dance’, which is also based on biographical sources.

Just before Christmas, Louise received a letter from the editor, who as of January 1^st would be starting in a new position with another publishing house, but her successor would, as was agreed with the managing director of Borgen, continue the project and help with the necessary revisions.

‘As the decent person I am, I thought that the new editor had enough on her plate, so I patiently waited for her to contact me. Which she did not. At the end of February, I emailed both the editor and the managing director of Borgen, feeling a little cross, but I received no answer. I emailed them again, and I also phoned them several times.

Finally, I got hold of the new editor over the phone. Naturally, she had been busy, so very busy, but now she had sent the manuscript to another consultant’. This puzzled Louise as the statement from the first consultant had been incredibly positive, but who was she to argue with their apparent need to double check.

Again, the publishers took their time. ‘At long last, I received the new statement, and I was pleased, as it praised the manuscript to the heavens, but … I could not believe my eyes … the editor had enclosed a letter,

Unfortunately, she could not find the time to publish ‘Constanze’, but naturally the book should be published, so I was free to contact another publishing house’.

When they returned the manuscript to Louise, the editor had edited a couple of chapters to show Louise how she thought her book should be revised! 

Knockout Break

Louise licked her wounds for what she called a knockout break and then she sent ‘Constanze’ to a publishing house then known as Centrum. The wait was just as long as it had been with the other publishers, but at least Louise was in touch with the editor at Centrum, both by email and phone and she was never ignored. ‘They were just so busy, so very busy, as if publishing houses are the only companies in the world who are busy’.

‘How naïve I was’, Louise says with a sigh, ‘the editor merely wanted to say no thank you in person, seeing as we had had so many pleasant conversations! I found keeping a straight face a little difficult. Well, I could certainly write, but could I not write something purely fictional, because the editor was afraid that those interested in Mozart would not read a biographical novel about him, and those who wanted to read historical novels would not want all the facts about Constanze and Mozart. The editor gave me the email address of a German publishing house, because German readers would probably be more interested in such a book than Danish readers’.

And she had edited a few chapters just to help me along … 

Now Louise had three different versions of her manuscript, edited by three different editors, ‘and what does that tell us?’ Louise asks, ‘ well, first and foremost, that the revisions by the three editors focused on very different aspects; what seemed completely wrong to one editor, was the very thing that made it work for the other editor, or it was totally ignored by the third editor. One should not for a moment think that editors from the world of publishing share a common literary set of qualitative markers by which they assess work. It is all about individual taste.

I asked one of them, how she spotted a novel worthy of publishing. The answer was, ”I follow my gut instinct” only her guts must have had an off-day, because now the publishing house has merged with another one!’, Louise laughs.

Tired of the Publishing Madams

By this time, Louise had grown rather tired of the ‘publishing madams’, which is how she refers to them, and after yet another knockout break, she sent her manuscript to the publishing house, Samleren.

‘The Male editor was all fired up’, Louise recounts, ‘but before I received a straight forward answer, I found a few things in the manuscript I felt needed to be corrected, so I rewrote it for the umpteenth time and drove to the publishing house with a new version. Only, this time I was not received with open arms, frosty voices seems more accurate!’

The editor asked me to leave the manuscript on the table, after which he walked to the window and looked down into the street below. Humiliated to an extent where I wished I could just have seeped through the floorboards, I said my farewell to his turned back.

Shortly after, the manuscript was returned with an arrogant covering letter stating that if this manuscript was to be taken at all seriously, it should end with Mozart’s death, which was also why the editor would suggest that I left out everything from Constanze’s years in Denmark. And everybody in the editorial office agreed. There were two of them.  

Give us that manuscript!

It had now been four years since Louise sent her manuscript to Rosinante and she had lost any respect she might have had for the established world of publishing. She decided to give a Danish publication one last shot. And if it turned into another refusal, she would herself translate the script into German, which is her second language, and try to have it published south of the border. So she checked the internet for new publishers.

The concept of Elkjaeroghansen attracted her. But wise from her earlier mistakes and expensive postage, she sent a letter of introduction explaining her work, while also including the projects she had been working on during the long waits and the knockout breaks.

‘The very next day, they called from the publishers, “Give us that manuscript!’”they said. Well, that sounded promising, but steady on, I thought, and almost phlegmatically I sent ‘Constanze’ on yet another journey. A week later, the publishers called, they wanted to publish the manuscript, was I available for a meeting on Monday? I was in the middle of lunch and I nearly chocked on my sandwich!’

And this time, it was for real

Elkjaeroghansen published ‘Constanze Mozart’ and Louise is forever grateful for that. ‘However’, she says, ‘when you have spent four years anxiously awaiting a chance to publish your manuscript, your life, your child, you become much to compliant. Among other things, I signed over the rights to sales abroad, even though my attorney had warned me not to, and it would indeed cost me a lot of money. But had they asked me to jump on my tongue all the way down Kompagnistræde, I would have done it!’

The publishing house went bankrupt

Being allowed to participate in the decision making process … i.e. involving the author in all processes concerning the publication of her book … turned out to be less than accurate, in terms of the really important decisions, Louise explains. Among other things, the publishers sold her book to the book club Bogklubben 12 bøger while she was in the US and without even asking her. And when Louise returned from the six weeks promotion and visiting friends trip to New England, it became obvious that the publishing house was close to bankruptcy, so she had to make sure that they did not sell the foreign publishing rights to just any old publishing house.

The publishers wanted DKR. 35,000 for their foreign publishing rights, and Louise did not argue, but paid up immediately. Shortly after, the publishing house closed down.

This left Louise with all the rights to her book, paid for in full, as well as a sold out book, and her optimism was intact; a Mozart bi-centenary celebration was looming on the horizon, and ‘Constanze Mozart’ had all ready sold out of three print runs, approximately 6,000 books.

In terms of a fourth print run, Louise contacted the editor at Gyldendal, who had been so exited about ‘Constanze’ while she was at Borgen. But now it was a very different story.

‘Sighing heavily and with an arrogant tone of voice, the editor made it quite clear to the dunce at the other end of the line that they would not dream of taking on a novel from another publishers. A principle might very well be a principle, but it could have been conveyed in a nicer manner’, Louise says. And by now, she was utterly fed up with established publishers.

Her own Publishing Company

Her family sat down around the dining table, and they came up with Amadeo Publishing. Starting your own publishing company is not something Louise would recommend others do. It is much more expensive than she thought it would be, and it is terribly time consuming. There is a tremendous amount of paperwork and you have to establish working relations with proof readers, graphic designers, website specialists, printers, bookshops and their organizations as well as distribution companies and online publishers, with translators, agents and publishing representatives driving around visiting all the Danish bookshops. You also have to sort out different codes and discounts, you have accounts to keep track of, or you pay an accountant lots of money to do it for you, and you have to do PR work and much, much more.

 

But once the publishing company is established, it is fun’, Louise says. ‘However, I suppose a writer is more or less destined to write in willed loneliness à la Montaigne, sitting in his tower with a cat in his lap and his head resting in the lap of his muses, rather than performing as a shrewd businesswoman with a keen eye on the money, as it leaves too little time for the essential part, which is writing books!’

However, being the mistress of your own house is wonderful. You waste no time being depressed over feudal publishing editors who sit in their glass cages far removed from real life. I find I can once again breathe effortlessly, and for me it has instigated a creative avalanche. Financially, it is nonetheless gambling with very high stakes’, Louise concludes.

                                                                                                                               Trisse Gejl

And today, in 2012?

By Louise Bugge Laermann

Above you have Trisse Gejl’s excellent interview with me from 2005. However, I might add that what Trisse expressed so politely in the interview can also be put quite differently:

I was shocked at the excruciating lack of knowledge about my subject matter on the part of the mentioned editors as well as by their undisguised wishes to alter the text that was so highly praised by their consultants, transforming it into mere clichés that sounded more like money in the box. Their arrogance was monstrous, as if we were back in the days of Queen Victoria, and you loathe yourself when you giver in to one affront after another. Which, granted, you only do up until a certain point. Enough is enough.

So despite warning voices telling me that critics would turn their thumbs down if I opened my own publishing company, my ‘spiritual’ need for freedom was much stronger than my fear of thumbs. I would rather have my ears boxed and suffer ridicule in Denmark than watch my life slowly drift by.

And as my publishing company did indeed get up and running, it even did better than most, the grey-black souls appeared, pretending to be my friends and then ripping me off. To put it bluntly.  

Looking back, seven years on, it was absolutely right to rid myself of the old module. Despite all the hassle, it has been a wonderful challenge and it has included personal and creative development … as well as a whole lot of beatings.

So far I have published six books, also available as e-books, an audio book, recorded by LBL, and the remaining books will also be recorded by LBL, namely me. All my books are popular with library users.

Of course, there were also critics, no all, but too many, who were of the ultra conservative opinion that ‘you cannot review authors who publish their own books’.

They could have gone to the trouble of clicking on Amadeo Publishing’s ‘contacts’ where my co-workers are listed. Even Gyldendal cannot muster a list of literary co-workers who would be more qualified than the ones on my list.

You cannot become a member of the union of publishers unless you have a yearly turnover of approximately one million DKR, and DBK, the distributions company, suddenly decided to raise their prizes significantly, if you only had a ‘small’ turnover.

Well, that is just Denmark for you. In the US, it is common practice that you buy a pair of shoes that might be a couple of sizes too big, but then you strive to fill them in the years to come.  

‘Denmark’ as our wise Benny Andersen writes ‘is a country where shoes that are too small are in demand’. 

Within this century, crime novels of highly diverse quality have gotten the upper hand. Primarily because they please. Today even the finest publishing houses sell pulp fiction, while fiction, poetry and drama suffer a wretched existence. If we excluded crime novels from the category of fiction, we would see how absolutely dire the existence of fictional writers truly is.

My plans to publish famous Chinese poetry and other narrow literature have been temporarily abandoned. However, I will not abandon my right to sell my ‘products’ nationally, but I will recommend that others do not spend money on producing e-books, they should rather spend it on having their books translated into English. Once that is accomplished, having them published by Kindle, Amazon, Barnes & Noble or the like is only a small step away.

The digital possibilities for self-publishing have almost exploded since I started Amadeo Publishing, and for that I am so very pleased!

                          Louise Bugge Laermann