"A lot of people think they can self-publish and it'll be okay"

What Steven asked Maria McCarthy and Bob Carling, formerly of publishers Cultured Llama

Married couple Maria McCarthy, a writer and poet, and Bob Carling, a book editor, recently ended their publishing project Cultured Llama. Steven met them at their home to learn more about the project and why it ended and to talk to them about how they met, what projects they are working on now, and whether they will work together again.

Maria McCarthy and Bob Carling.

What was Cultured Llama?
Maria: Cultured Llama was an indie publishing house that started by accident. I was unwell at the time. I had been laid up with a bad back. This is always a dangerous time because I have big ideas and no money to back them up. I said, ‘Why don't we publish a book in memory of a friend of mine?’ Karen McAndrew had recently died of cancer. She lived in Rochester. We did that book in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support and put on quite a big show down at the Sittingbourne theatre. We did an evening of spoken word and music and wrote in people like Los Alvedores to perform and Bob’s band. Bob had bought 10 ISBNs, and we thought, ‘What should we do with the rest?’ We opened it up to other submissions and because my interests and things that I write are poems, short stories and some non-fiction, we had that specifically in mind, the three areas that we would publish. We did it with no money, no business plan and we just went for it. We published 44 books in the end over seven years.

What was your main involvement in Cultured Llama? What was your role?
Maria: I was a poetry and fiction editor. I would look at the submissions and decide which we wanted to publish and work with the authors on editing their work and making it as good as possible. Anne-Marie Jordan was our non-fiction editor and also putting books in envelopes and things like that. We used to do that together. We called it stuffage. Plus, keeping up the website and social media and things like that.
Bob: My role was to make sure that the books looked right, typographical design, putting the books together. It was a coordination of things, commissioning the cover for the book. We used a very good friend for most of the design of the covers, Mark Holihan. He's a great artist.
Maria: And poet.
Bob: And poet himself, yes. In fact, one of the Cultured Llama books was his own. The other thing I did, Maria mentioned we didn't have a business model. I spent my life in publishing, as a commissioning editor mostly and I'd expected after the first book we did to spend a lot of time sitting down uploading what they call metadata which is all the stuff to do with the book, the blurb, how many pages, things like coding for where the book should go in a bookshop. Because booksellers need to know exactly what type of book it is, the coding is quite important. All of that boring stuff. I thought I'd have to do that for each of the individual book distributors. Amazon obviously, not just UK Amazon, but US Amazon and all the other Amazons, but all the other distributors. There's about 40 or 50 main distributors of books.
Anyway, what we did was we used effectively a business model worked really well for us and that was to use one supplier, Ingram. Ingram are an international organisation that's been in the publishing world for years, but you can do what's called print-on-demand books. The point being that you upload the final design, cover design and the internal of the book to Ingram's server, and then Ingram take all of the metadata that you've already uploaded to out to all the distributors. I didn't have to do it, I just did it once, for each individual book and then Ingram did it all for us. It worked really well. The other point about that is that print-on-demand works really well for small independent publishers because you don't have to print a whole load of books and warehouse them somewhere, embarrassed that you can't sell them. Print-on-demand really does mean print-on-demand so when somebody orders a book through the Ingram process, through their distributors, Amazon or whoever, the order comes into Ingram, Ingram then fulfil that order and then they pay us in due course, for the books that we've sold. It can be a singleton book or thirty books or whatever, and you can also order them yourselves. We have book launches and that sort of thing. All of that worked extremely well for us.

With the Cultured Llama catalogue, was there a specific theme for the books?
Maria: Yeah well, I mean these are things that I write myself, things I'm interested in, and we had quite a range. We had some Medway writers, Philip Kane and, of course, Stephen Morris, the Do It Yourself: History of Music in Medway book, but we got people from all over the place. I think we turned down someone in New Zealand because the distribution would be quite difficult there, which is a shame because I really liked her writing. But it was all sorts of things really. We had an American poet, Bethany Pope, who now lives in China, and she was one of our first poetry books, and that was quite an interesting book about her grandparents mainly. One of her grandparents is of Native American origin, and she has quite an interesting personal history. We had another young writer, Richard Thomas, and then we started getting people coming to us like Sarah Selway, who'd been Canterbury Laureate a few years back. She had a book about the history of gardens, and she visited lots of gardens in Kent and the book was a hybrid book of her own visits with some poetry and memoir and photographs. That did get on the shelves in Waterstones Canterbury and we had to go moving it around from local interest to gardening to poetry. It was one of those hard to categorise books.
The short fiction collections, we published Maggie Harris, who's well known in Medway and now lives in Broadstairs. Two short story collections by her with a Thanet interest in them. We started getting known, and people came to us with quite a variety of styles. Our non-fiction section was cultural non-fiction of things that interested us. To work on a book, to be an editor of a book and to promote it, you have to really like it. Some things that came to us, the writing was very good, but it just wasn't something that interested me. I would say to any authors trying to get published, don't get discouraged, another editor will love their work.