13.04.16
www.thebookseller.com Q&A NII PARKES FLIPPED EYE, FOUNDER Eye on the prize
Award-winning writer Nii Parkes set up poetry and fiction press Flipped Eye nearly 15 years ago. He talks to Tom Tivnan about publishing outside the traditional channels
Tom Tivnan: You’ve recently ramped up Flipped Eye’s publishing programme. Why have you increased the output? Nii Parkes: It’s only in the past three years or so that we’ve started to think about Flipped Eye properly as a growing entity. We initially started 15 years ago as a poetry magazine and the book publishing flowed from there. But I have been thinking about how Flipped Eye will survive and grow if I’m not here—not that I’m thinking about dying anytime soon! There are things we just can’t do in an ad hoc manner anymore. We’ve consolidated financially so we can pay editors properly. It’s freeing, because being a very small press means that you often can’t take time to think strategically because you are constantly fighting fires. We wanted to grow organically; a lot of small publishers in this country are reliant on Arts Council England [ACE] funding; we were grateful for ACE funding early on but we haven’t taken any money from it since 2007, because we didn’t want to fall into the trap of relying on it.
TT: You’ve built your business to some extent outside of traditional book retailing. Can explain how you have done so? NP: First, I should say I’m very frugal. When I started publishing, I had the view that nothing we published was going to be [priced] over £5.95 if I could help it. This kind of goes back to when I was a student in Manchester and couldn’t afford to buy books. But that low price means that if you go through the traditional system, you have to discount up to 65% with the distributor, so
Q&A FLIPPED EYE
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they pass 40% on to the bookstore. To me, that doesn’t work because you, the publisher, are going to be losing money. So we figured out fairly quickly that if we
NII PARKES BIOGRAPHY
Nii Ayikewi Parkes was born in the UK, raised in Ghana and read English at Manchester Metropolitan University. His first poetry collection, eyes of a boy, lips of a man, was published in 1999, and his 2009 début novel Tail of the Blue Bird was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and won the Prix Mahogany and Prix Baudelaire when published in France in 2014. He founded poetry magazine Flipped Eye in 2003, and launched the book list two years later.
invested our effort on building relationships with readers, we got better yields (in terms of sales) than if we spent the same amount of time in meetings with [retailers’] book buyers. Technology has helped
too. Around 70% of our sales are through [p.o.d. specialist] Lightning Source. In the past five years or so, the quality of p.o.d. has really caught up [with traditional printing]. This has been helpful with books we sell into the US or Canada, especially in terms of distribution, as we are printing over there and we don’t have to ship from the UK.
TT: Your lead title for 2016 is Leila Segal’s Cuba-based Breathe. You have been working with her for some time . . . NP: The first email I got from Leila about this book was in 2010. I said to her: “There is something really good here, but it needs work.” But that is what Flipped Eye is about. We are a press that develops writers; it’s not uncommon for me to spend three to four years working with an author. But I put the time in with writers who I think possess a great talent and who it is worth working with on a long-term basis.
TT: Are you afraid you will lose writers to bigger publishers after developing them? NP: Oh, we have! That’s just part of the business. But then I am really happy for [the writers]. And the relationships we have forged never seem to go away—a few authors who have moved still call me first when they have a dilemma. That’s gratifying. And on the business side, if someone moves and becomes successful we will still have their backlist, and it’s like publishing them all over again.
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