I recently had the great pleasure of sitting down with Ben Lindner for a wide-ranging discussion on his podcast, Beyond the Zero. You can listen to the full discussion below, but I’ve broken the transcript into three parts focusing on my publishing activities, my writing, and my reading habits respectively. In this first part of the transcript, I share a little bit of my personal background—what led me from Australia to Scotland via Birmingham—and then I delve into the origins, logistics, editorial vision, and financial arrangements of Splice.
BTZ
Welcome to Season 2, Episode 28 of Beyond the Zero. I’m your host, Ben, and joining me today is Daniel Davis Wood. Daniel is a writer and he’s the editor and founder at Splice. Welcome to the show, Daniel.
Daniel Davis Wood
Thanks.
BTZ
So you [live] in Scotland, your wife has family here in Melbourne and you grew up in northern New South Wales. Can you tell us a bit about how you ended up on the border of Scotland and England?
Daniel Davis Wood
Well, it’s a very long story. But I think the short version goes like… let’s see…
The Venn diagram of my personality and interests and the place I grew up is non-overlapping. I was, from a very young age, very keen to get out of Australia, which I did when I was nineteen. I moved to America first and then I moved to Britain, to Scotland, and then, for the purposes of going on to further study, at a later point I moved back to Australia for a few years to do a PhD. That’s where I met my wife. Then, when that was finished, we moved abroad again to Switzerland together. And then, following the birth of our daughter—she has some very particular special needs, so in search of support for those we went to back to Britain. First [we went] to Birmingham and then, after the first Covid lockdown, because things weren’t working for us in Birmingham on a personal level, we called it quits and ended up back in Scotland for me, and in Scotland for the first time [for my wife].
BTZ
Wow, okay. That’s pretty massive, and that’s the short version. Briefly: we all know Birmingham is a bit of a shithole, how was your time there?
Daniel Davis Wood
It was very rough. I mean, Birmingham in England is a very large city; there are a couple of million people who live there, and within the broader area around it, there’s probably five or six million people. But, for the things that we’re interested in we look for infrastructure, we want writers’ support groups or independent bookstores—things that run events—and they literally don’t exist in Birmingham. Birmingham has a single bookstore in the centre: it’s a Waterstones, it’s very corporate. There’s not an independent literary culture anywhere in that area, that would allow anything beyond the mainstream to flourish or come to the attention of the people of the West Midlands. So, in many respects Birmingham was very tough, but in that respect particularly, because it felt a bit like a desert. It’s quite arid to be a writer in Birmingham.
BTZ
To use a really crap metaphor, Birmingham as a desert really grew a flower and that was Splice. Can you tell us how Splice emerged from the shithole of Birmingham?
Daniel Davis Wood
I like that metaphor, actually.
So I think people generally are aware that in the last seven or eight years there’s been a wave of small press publishing that has washed through the UK, with publishers like Fitzcarraldo and And Other Stories and Influx Press and a bunch of others producing some really interesting and challenging and innovative books. But that’s the second wave of small press publishing in the UK. The first wave was sort of around the late 1990s into the early 2000s, mid-2000s, and that wave was kickstarted by a small press in Birmingham called Tindall Street Press. So, at that stage, things were looking up for Birmingham and its prospects.
And if you [do go to Birmingham] today and you do connect with Writing West Midlands and the people who run very small initiatives that are trying to do something for literature, they remember Tindall Street as kind of, you know, the glory days of small press publishing in that area. So when the second wave of small presses came about, a lot of people [in Birmingham] were unsettled that Birmingham had nothing to show for it, and at the time I was in Birmingham and I was trying to—I was interested in doing something like setting up a small press and, by luck, I connected with a few people that ended up producing a very small pool of money for someone who would want to take on this project of establishing a Birmingham-based small press, [who would try] to put Birmingham on the map, nationally, within the UK, for producing small press literature that could get attention for the city and its culture and maybe, you know, ignite something more exciting around there.
[Anyway,] I ended up taking that on, basically putting my hand up and saying, “Look, I’ll do as much legwork as I can with money for the writers, but it’s voluntary from my side of things.” But the brief was that it had to be for the good of writers in the West Midlands, writers in Birmingham and the surrounding area, [and] I agreed to that and found it an immense challenge because—well, [due] a variety of reasons. The main one [was] that. actually, a lot of writers in the West Midlands weren’t particularly interested in writing literary fiction at all. It was just really, really hard to find writers who would say “This is the kind of thing that I like to read and this is the kind of thing that I like to write” if it was literary or unusual in any way. It’s a much more of a genre fiction kind of place, if anything, for the writers that are there. Long story short, I realised that it was probably easier to attract attention for the press in a different way, in a way that wasn’t actually connected to local writers, and then try to raise the profile of the press that way and maybe attract local writers afterwards. So I ended up publishing books by writers in the United States, further afield in England, in Manchester, in London and then in Australia as well—the first of which was Hang Him When He Is Not There by Nicholas John Turner—and those first three or four books really did attract a little bit of attention in the UK. Hang Him was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize and Michael Conley’s Flare and Falter was longlisted for [the Edge Hill Prize] and things like that. So I kind of went down that path and still, despite having raised the profile [of Splice], I found it a real challenge to find local writers who were producing unusual literary fiction.
In the end, I guess you could kind of say I went rogue a little bit. I did what I was not really supposed to do originally and I’ve published very few West Midlands-based writers, but a lot of other interesting writers, and I used the money for those purposes. And so I had it in the agreement that I could take the press with me when the money that originally seeded it was gone, and that happened when I moved to Scotland. So I run it independently now, still—to my mind—with more of a remit to publish unconventional fiction wherever I can find it, regardless of who the writers are or where they are coming from.
BTZ
Well, now that the press is a couple years old, in my opinion it’s one of the most interesting publishing houses around. You publish books like The Logos [and] Square Wave by Mark de Silva as well, Babel from Gabriel Blackwell, short stories by Greg Gerke [and] his essay collection—that’s just to name a few. Obviously, Nicholas John Turner as well. Do you want to take us on a bit of a like tour of your catalogue [and] tell us about some of the things you’re really excited about?
Daniel Davis Wood
I guess I’d say my interests are quite varied as a reader and as an editor, so the books in the back catalogue are kind of broken down into almost thematic groupings, different styles of writing. The first grouping was focusing on absurdist or fabulist fiction, things that were taking just wildly out there subjects and doing bizarre things with them stylistically. Nicholas John Turner’s Hang Him is in that grouping. The second grouping was more anchored in the real world, but in a kind of wry or critical way. Greg Gerke’s collection, Especially the Bad Things, is in there, and a short story collection by a writer named Deidre Shanahan, which is razor sharp—stylistically very sharp realism—and Blackwell’s Babel as well, which, for all its strange qualities... there’s a lot of Lovecraftian stuff and science fiction in there, but a lot of it is anchored in relationships between parents and children and very domestic things that are dealt with in unusual ways.
Then the third grouping was more contemplative or meditative fiction, a bit of psychogeography from Anna McDonald and from Peter Holm Jensen, and [the fourth grouping] has been focusing on things that are, well, big and ambitious [but] sort of start small and just go almost interstellar. Like, Waypoints by Adam Ouston starts with just a tiny, tiny anecdote from something that happened in a field in Melbourne and goes into, you know, transhumanism and things like that; and The Logos starts with a guy in an apartment building who is just looking at the tiniest brushstrokes of a piece of art he’s making, and when you find out what he’s drawing and why he’s doing it, [the novel] of explodes from there.
So, you know, the words that I keep coming back to are unconventional and adventurous and ambitious—[I’m interested in] writers who are really saying, “Whatever the mainstream is, whatever people might expect from a short story [or a novel] today, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to do something else—and what that something else is, I may not know when I start the project, but I’m not going to do x, y, and z that might satisfy many people’s expectations.” I like fiction that really takes a risk—coming to the page with the author knowing that probably most people who encounter it are not going to respond to it, then going hell for leather anyway.
BTZ
You’ve also had a classic selection and it includes one of my favourite books, Against Nature, by J.K. Huysmans. Are there some other titles in that series that you’re looking forward to producing?
Daniel Davis Wood
Yeah, the classic selection is a group of books where, if you read these and you take them all together, then you will understand what Splice is all about. It’s like, if you want to submit to Splice, read these books first, and if your book is on the same wavelength, then, you know, you’re in. Huysmans is in there, Michael Kohlhaas is coming up—by Heinrich von Kleist—and a book called Journal of a Disappointed Man by a guy named W.N.P. Barbellion. Have you ever heard of Barbellion? Journal of a Disappointed Man is really one of my favourites. If you like Against Nature, you’ll probably like that too. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a guy who is like—it’s his journal—[and] he’s kind of a hypochondriac, an incredible depressive, [and he] has a disposition towards excess in his misery, [like] a proto-Thomas Bernhard but without the run-on style.
Then what’s also in [the classic selection] is a really weird book called A Voyage Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre. It’s a true story about a guy who was sentenced to house arrest for his involvement in a duel, and what he realised was that, during his house arrest, he had no shortage of interesting places to visit and fascinating things to see if he’d just walk across his room. It’s literally just a catalogue of what a guy sees when he walks across one room, told as if he is travelling across a vast continent. He has [an] obsession with minute details and things around him that—when he fixates on one and then tries to magnify it, it becomes hilarious and ridiculous and also kind of moving.
BTZ
Excellent. Okay, I’m putting both of those two last things on my list, definitely reading them.
Daniel Davis Wood
Do it.
BTZ
One of the things I wanted to ask you about is the economics of small press publishing. I know that most people listening to this are huge supporters of small presses. We all want to access books that are, like you said, really interesting, pushing boundaries. Could you tell us a bit about the difficulties and successes of the small press and how we, as book buyers, can best support small presses?
Daniel Davis Wood
Well, the last [question] is easy to answer: buy directly from the small press. It’s much more remunerative for both the press and the author if you go straight through them and cut out places like Amazon and Book Depository. But aside from that—I think it would be easier for people to understand if, perhaps small presses and independent publishers made more efforts to clarify what actually counts as success [and explain] what the norm is for a book that isn’t published by one of the big five.
So, you have the big five publishers in the UK. [You have them] everywhere, but I’ll talk UK-specific. You have the big five publishers, then you have an intermediate band of publishers like Granta and Canongate that are underneath them. They’re not big five and they do a lot of adventurous stuff, but they’re independent: they have a good financial base, and they subsidise a lot of their literary publishing with very successful crime novels and things like that. And then you have small press publishers underneath them—presses that are, you know, their finances are a bit more precarious. That includes Splice, but it includes Dead Ink, Dodo Ink, Influx, and those sorts of presses.
Now, a lot of people who look at it from the outside are surprised when I tell them things like there was a book published by Canongate recently, within the last, eighteen months, by a writer who already had quite a well-established profile, had been nominated for some major awards, and this book itself was on the longlist and shortlist of some national awards in the UK—and this writer, with this independent press, received an advance of £2,000 and didn’t earn out with it. If you take that as what I would characterise as a pretty good deal for somebody who is writing non-marketable fiction, literary fiction, that’s sort of what you would expect from those intermediate presses. Now, when you’re talking about smaller presses than that, the finances, of course, become, you know, commensurably smaller. In the case of Splice, we have a different deal to what some other small presses in the UK have, where we offer authors an acquisition fee. It’s not an advance, it’s a flat fee that [authors] get, no matter what happens, and then the royalties for authors kick in with the sale of the very first copy. So we give [authors] a few hundred pounds [and] they don’t have to do anything to earn that back, then they start getting more pounds from the sale of copy number one. That’s the same sort of arrangement as some other small presses in the UK, like CB Editions, and then there are others that don’t offer money up-front at all, but only royalties beginning with the sale of the first copy—usually a standard 10% or 15%—and there are others that offer a larger advance, but the author is unlikely ever to earn it out, so it’s more or less a flat fee and the publisher basically takes whatever the book generates in bookstores.
That’s how it works between publishers and authors. And then, in terms of production, the cost that you face as a publisher [is] whatever you’re paying the author up front, plus printing, which is going way up right now, plus warehousing and distribution, and bookstores will take a slice of the sale price of a book as well. So, to break it down, for example, if I have a book that gets sold at £9.99 in a bookstore, the bookstore is going to take about 50% of that, which leaves £4.50 to come back to the press, which is what the press has to use to pay for the actual production of the book, which costs about £2.00, which leaves the press after everything with about £2.50, maybe £2.00 after taxes and so on, to give to the author in whatever arrangement they’ve got. For Splice, [it’s a] fifty-fifty [arrangement], so Splice authors usually walk away with about a pound for every book sold in a bookshop. If it goes straight through the press, they walk away with about £2.50 because we sell for the same price, but we don’t have to pay 50% to a bookshop. Those are the basics of the economic arrangements. Does that answer what you’re getting at?
BTZ
It does, but it doesn’t tell me—and this is what is my concern about it—like it doesn’t seem like an economically feasible model for writers or, you know, for the people publishing books. So I guess what I want to know is: how does this become something that’s feasible for everybody involved?
Daniel Davis Wood
There are different ways that it can become feasible. First of all, most presses that are sustained over any length of time in the UK are subsidised by the government through, in England, it’s the Arts Council of England, and in Scotland it’s Creative Scotland. [Presses] like Dead Ink, which was the first press to publish The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas, for example, receive a few tens of thousands of pounds in funding from ACE, over a number of years. It’s still a very small amount of money considering that there are x number of people behind the press and they have so many things to pay. Others do it in a different way. So, for example, And Other Stories also received ACE funding [some years ago,] but they used that to jump to a subscription model, [or] to build out a subscription model that already existed, so that they [could] underwrite their upfront costs—[so] because they have subscribers, their economics are a bit more stable. It’s the same with Fitzcarraldo; they have a subscription offer as well.
Mostly, though, in any honest assessment, it’s not a way to make living for writers, and presses are lucky if they break even. That’s the takeaway. And some presses that haven’t received funding have kind of grouped together to try and get group funding, so they can still get something to cover their basic costs by, I guess, crowdfunding, with government assistance. But those sorts of things really rely on timing [and] luck, and make you answerable to different criteria based on whichever region you’re in.
BTZ
I think that this leads into my question about Mark De Silva’s The Logos. That’s one of the most ambitious novels that I’ve seen published in a very long time, and I don’t know if other presses would have taken it up without you guys doing it. But you’ve told me about the challenges in publishing this particular work, [so] how does a work like that come out? How do you make sure that that work gets to see the light of day?
Daniel Davis Wood
Well, you’ve read The Logos, and I think anyone who reads The Logos—anyone who gets within ten pages of The Logos—will know immediately that it is a work of considerable merit on its own terms. That’s how my interest was piqued first of all. It wasn’t by a summary. I had read Square Wave, but I don’t necessarily have a commitment to publishing new books by authors I admire. It’s the book on its own terms [that matters]. So I picked up the manuscript when Mark sent it to me and it had the x-factor, I guess. It was doing all the things that I would wait for manuscripts to do, so I immediately thought [that] this [was] something that I would be inclined to publish. [I] read the book all the way to the end, just to be sure, [and] it confirmed my initial response to it, and I thought, “Yes, this is something that I want to publish.” But of course the economics were going to be difficult—I knew that straight away, I did some calculations straight away—and, in my initial response to Mark, I took the economic case to him, and I said, “This is essentially almost an unprofitable book from a purely economic perspective within the UK. The number of pages it’d require would put the cost price per unit at about £12.00, and you have a price point ceiling of about £17.00 or £18.00, because otherwise then you compete with brand new hardbacks, which makes it unlikely that people in bookstores are going to pick it up, which then gives you a very slim £5.00 margin from which to take royalties and all those other sorts of things.” I wanted to make sure that Mark was aware of that, and that he went into it with eyes open—that we were going into it with our eyes open—but at the end of the day, what it really came down to was, you know, in committing to the book… What does the press exist for, if it doesn’t exist to produce books like that?
I think—partly because of the material in the book, which is very challenging, [and] partly because of the public discourse that the book could fall into, since it’s not a politically correct book [and] not easily assimilated into currents within the discourse; it really challenges [you] wherever you stand—for all those reasons, as well as the economic reasons, I didn’t see what would make a larger publisher take it on. It came to me and I thought, “Yeah, it’s the kind of thing that would struggle to get into the big five for those reasons, and probably independent publishers for the economic reasons more than anything. So then would I be willing to make no money on it and still try to get it to however many hundreds, hopefully thousands of readers it [might appeal to]?” [And my answer was:] “Yes. That is what [Splice is] there for.” And that’s what the classics range in Splice is there for as well: to generate something to subsidise books like The Logos. And, you know, when I started the press, [I] started it with dreams, of course, and one of the dreams I had was that a book like The Logos would come along at some point for me. It’s the kind of manuscript that you’re waiting for as a publisher with my tastes—so when it comes, you just do what you have to do, even if it means taking a hit economically and in terms of my labour, [the] hours and hours and hours and hours of work in The Logos. There’s an impetus behind the entire initiative and The Logos satisfies that, resonates with it, so [the decision] was a no-brainer.
BTZ
I wanted to ask you… I think you may have already answered this, but as a publisher, I assume that there’s kind of a white whale book that you’re out there for. Did Mark de Silva’s The Logos—was [that] your white whale, or do you think there’s something else out there that you’re hunting for?
Daniel Davis Wood
I mean, I hope he’s not the white whale, because the white whale destroys the ship in the end! [And] I would actually say, “No.” I think each book has its own challenges and satisfactions, and it’s hard to imagine that there’s something out there that has the sort of perfect ratio or the perfect alchemy of challenge and satisfaction, [as if they can be] balanced in a way. Things like Greg Gerke’s essay collection, See What I See, in its first iteration, which was published by Splice—that was also satisfying in a [different] way than The Logos was satisfying, in that it didn’t exist in manuscript form. That was me being a fan of Greg Gerke and thinking, “I would publish a book of Greg Gerke essays no matter what.” Also, economically, it didn’t really matter. I wanted to see that book in the world—it was a good thing that I wanted to deliver up to people who might be interested—so I wrote to Greg and I made this case to him and said, “Would you be interested in doing this?” And he was [interested], thankfully, but then it was—I don’t know, not a white whale, it was something that didn’t exist [and] we had to build it, we had to put it together, painstakingly [asking]: “What goes in? What doesn’t? What order does it go in?”—and line by line re-editing everything. And at the stage that [Splice] published [See What I See], that was the biggest book, 450 pages in the UK edition, and it felt a bit like a white whale—but now I look at it alongside The Logos and I couldn’t tell you which one is the white whale and which one isn’t. They’re kind of different beasts.
BTZ
Okay. I wanted to ask you: what have you got coming up for the press?
Daniel Davis Wood
So the last title that we’ve got coming up this year is a collection of essays by Genese Grill. It’s called Portals. It an interesting one for us. Again, it was coming from a place where I thought, “I like the challenge of this and also I like Genese Grill’s essays; I’ve been reading her for a while.” What she’s dealing with in this book is the connection between materiality, like actual physical tangible objects, and something like a spiritual dimension to the world, an intangible dimension. She doesn’t really see these two things as distinct. Actually, she sees one as being accessible through the other. So, to kind of augment the idea of the book, we’re going to do a limited run of deluxe hardcovers that have some of the material properties that Genese discusses in relation to other books within the book. [But only] people who order direct through the press will be able to get those hardcovers. Through Amazon and elsewhere, I’m afraid you’ll have to make do with the paperback, which doesn’t quite have the same dimensions as the hardback will. So we’re doing a double edition there, which is not something that has really happened before.
BTZ
Put me down for that please. I’m going to go and order that. And hopefully, after that, I can get back to some short stories as well.
Daniel Davis Wood
There are some short story authors who are also in discussions, but none of that is finalised yet. That would be for 2023-24.
BTZ
Okay. I wanted to ask you as well about e-books. I think you and me are both physical book people. I think we love having a book in our hands, and I think that it shows in the publication of The Logos and Genese Grill as well—the value that you put into the physical book itself. But in terms of e-books, how do you feel about those? And obviously the economics of it are good for publishers, but how do you feel about them in general?
Daniel Davis Wood
As a publisher, I feel great. I like that people like e-books. We do put a bit of work into e-books. Each of the Splice e-books are hard-coded—that’s the term that I think I bandy about with my designer and typesetter, meaning that he goes behind the scenes: he doesn’t just use a WYSIWYG editor or whatever it is, he goes and makes sure that [the coding] is in order and it’s nicely produced. The overheads are much lower [and] there is a number of people who buy e-books, that is surprising to me. I, personally, don’t like them at all as a reader, and before I got into [the business] I assumed that that was the way most people felt—but no, there’s quite a contingent out there who are very happy with e-books. I don’t know if that’s to do with price, or to do with physical convenience with a book like The Logos—it’s hard to hold a thousand pages. I find it nice, but other people may not.
But, you know, one of the most valuable and most influential things that I’ve ever heard came from the Canadian novelist and essayist Douglas Glover, who I worked with very briefly and have learned a lot from as a writer and reader. He said that when you’re reading a book, the first thing you need to do, if you are reading for structure and style, is to actually know how big this is. What is the size of this thing? What are its proportions? How is it broken down, purely in terms of number of pages? Where are the breaks, and where is each break relative to all the other breaks? How many pieces is it chopped into? How thin or thick is each one? And so on... I guess that’s a material thing, in a way. For me, it’s a question of—I think of books as kind of time capsules. Each book—I can tell how much time it’s going to take based on the number of pages, and I want to know how much time [each unit of the book is] going to take up, relative to all the other units. That’s a really important part of the reading experience for me and I think it rests on having a physical object in my hand. Aside from the fact that it feels good, it’s like feeling the time of the book: I can hold the time of it in my hand and I kind of rely on that. But you can’t get it through e-books at all, really, so I guess that’s showing the difference between my own personal take and my take as a publisher.
BTZ
I feel like I should mention at this point that in terms of physical books, one of the key things that I love about them is the fact that you can pass them on to people. And tonight I’m reflecting on that, because Michael Winkler’s Grimmish was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin [Literary Award] and I realised that I don’t have a copy anymore because I have given all my copies of this book to other people. I keep buying copies of these books and giving them away and you can’t really do that with an ebook.
Daniel Davis Wood
I don’t think you can do that with Grimmish anymore either. I think that supply [ie. the original self-published print run] is gone, unfortunately. I’ve got one and I think it’s very justly longlisted for the Miles Franklin and I hope it goes all the way—although that may make the copies you’ve given away worth a lot more than they were.
BTZ
I think I was signed as well. Damn.
Daniel Davis Wood
Quite an investment you’ve yielded, out there.
BTZ
All right, one more question about publishing, but more for writers. What are the kind of things that you would give as advice for writers who are submitting books?
Daniel Davis Wood
I think I would say to writers:
(A) Don’t submit anything unless you know that what you’re submitting is something that you have given everything you’ve got in you. Absolutely everything you’ve got in you [has to go] into that one book. If it doesn’t have that, don’t bother.
(B) You know, in your heart of hearts, when you are lying awake in bed at night—you know whether that book has everything that you’ve got in you, everything that you are capable of. So if you submit it hoping that you can pull the wool over someone’s eyes, or if you submit it with the view that a lot of people I’ve received things from have—which is that it’s not the best thing in the world, but it’s good enough, and it’s as good as a lot of other stuff [they’ve] seen out there—that doesn’t work. You know, in your heart of hearts, when you are making that kind of bad faith case for yourself.
For a press like Splice and a lot of small presses in the UK, we’re not interested in marketability. We’re not interested in where something sits in relation to other books in the market. We’re not always interested in having a product that we can sell. What we’re interested in is a piece of work that is innovative and true to itself on its own terms. That takes a lot of labour to produce, a lot of intellectual and creative labour, because [as a writer] you have to get yourself out of the market mindset and come up with something that escapes the prefabricated modes of thought and creativity that the market gives us. You know whether you’ve done that when you are submitting something—and if you’re unsure, if you can’t say in, full faith, “Yes, this is a work that is unique and is authentically the best thing that I can possibly produce at this stage as a writer,” if you can’t fully [commit to] that statement when you’re pressing the submit button: don’t submit. Go back to [the work] and keep going until you can say that.
BTZ
Great advice, great advice. With that, let’s move on to your books…