Interview - Kyle MacRae of Blasted Heath

Kyle MacRae & Allan Guthrie

Since its launch in 2011 Scottish indie publisher Blasted Heath has built an intriguing, crime-based list which features feral teens, down at heel gamblers and a murderous barber. Founded by author and literary agent Allan Guthrie and serial entrepreneur Kyle MacRae it's developed a solid following with fans of the hard stuff and brought some exciting new talent to readers. Kyle joins me today for a bit of a chat...

 
What initially inspired you to get into publishing? 
 
Pity. When I first met the Best Selling Kindle Author, Ebook Entrepreneur & Renowned Literary Agent, Allan Guthrie, he took me by the hand and led me through the sad streets of publishing. Why, there was poor Douglas Lindsay, author of the 19^th century Barney Thomson classics, curled up in a cocoon of bile and disillusionment while he psycho-morphed into Elvis Shackleton, a bit like Ziggy Stardust segueing to Aladdin Sane but with a Dylan soundtrack. Brennan was homeless on the bad streets of Belfast, broken by Buckfast and meth (-alayted spirits, not crystal). Nobody at all had heard of Gary Carson, not even his mum. They still haven’t. Ray Banks was on the run from sicko-noir groupies. Still is. Back then, Anthony Neil Smith was little more than a figment of his dog’s imagination, which is a pretty desperate state of affairs when you think about it. We brought the bastard to life.
 
How did Blasted Heath come into being?
 
Quickly. It’s well known in certain circle jerks that Allan Guthrie stalked me and threatened to slam my testicles in a drawer (cf Two-WaySplit) if I didn't jack in everything else and help him invent Cool Digital Publishing. So we cobbled together some contracts, a handful of Kindle files and a website. Blasted Heath was birthed on November 1^st 2011.
 
Mike Scott wrote a song to celebrate our launch 


 
Drunk his soul dry, so we did.
 
Blasted Heath is two years old now - congratulations - what's been the highlight for you so far?
Survival. Given that 98 UK publishers went under in the last year that’s quite an achievement. Then again, we don’t spend anything so we couldn’t go bust if we tried. 
 
You've steered clear of the more conventional type of crime novel, was that a conscious decision, seeking out challenging, noirish work? 
Not at all. We wish the heathens would write really commercial best-selling TV-series-friendly movie-deal-pending blue-rinse-tastic mainstream crime fiction without all the sweariness, violence and transgression. I have no idea why they don’t.
 
Speaking to your authors I get the sense that there's a great relationship between them and you and Al, how have you found the experience of working with them?
You’ve spoken to our authors? Don’t believe a word those bitches say. Especially Banks. It’s a thoroughly unhealthy relationship based on co-dependency. We own their heathen asses and they resent it.
 
What role do you see indies playing over the next few years?
I guess indies will continue to publish really interesting books that the big boys won’t take a punt on, at least in print, which makes the Kindle Store the breeding and discovery ground for new talent. Then we’ll get abandoned by our authors once we've made them huge. Hurrah!

The big houses will probably move more towards a low-risk ‘co-publishing’ model a la to Italian publisher RSC Libri’s recent experiment.
 
But who needs the big boys anyway? Readers validate, and they don't give a fuck about publishers. 
 
Outside publishing you specialise in media training and digital marketing, so what tips would you give authors on developing their profile?  
There are no tips. Social media is bullshit for selling books other than books about how social media can help you sell books. Which it can't. The only contacts worth cultivating are those who’ll give you awesome reviews so shag them and ignore everything and everybody else.  
 
Tell us about the Blasted Bundles...
BlastedBundles are an even cheaper way for folk to buy our already cheap ebooks in bulk. They’re brilliant. We launched them a few weeks ago and we’ve sold one.
 
What's coming up next from Blasted Heath?
I’m betting we can sell a second Blasted Bundle, but then I'm an optimist. Other than that, I guess we'll continue to try to figure out how to make money when free becomes the only viable price for digital content.

Creating the Crime Novel Cover

Over at Blasted Heath crime e-publishers, the cover artist of choice is JT Lindroos. Here's the final version of the cover for HARD BITE written by Anonymous-9, available everywhere e-books are sold on October 25th, 2012. JT Lindroos talks about the cover-art process, in his own words...

Being a movie buff, when I got the logline for the book ("A wheelchair bound vigilante with an assassin monkey") I thought of an AMAZING MR. NO LEGS and MONKEY SHINES poster mashup. Given budget and time constraints, this is a simplified and modernized version of that initial idea.

With any e-book cover you want keep it simple. Much as I'd love to do a retro pulp or faux movie poster cover, the amount of time and money allotted for e-book covers means finding shorthand to get an idea across. I thought it might be a funny gag cover to send to Al [Guthrie] for a laugh, but soon as I drew it up, it just worked. I quickly assembled the rest of the cover and sent it off to Al hoping he'd like it too. I often send covers I 'kind of like' for some feedback, but in this case I was hoping he'd just go with it. He did.

The rusty background provided texture more interesting than a solid, clean surface. Grit, rust, whatever is another easy and appealing shorthand for something that's visceral and lo-fi, not overproduced pablum. It suggests and implies, but allows you to read into it whatever you wish.

Note: The editor for the HARD BITE book trailer, Mark Oguschewitz, took all the elements of the cover and utilized them in the video title cards. Now, the handicap-icon stick figure rolls through the video brandishing his gun, and the rusty, textured background is the new backdrop for quotes about the book.

BIO: JT Lindroos was born in Finland. Happily married for the past 12 years, Lindroos gained his US citizenship 5 years ago. He's a fast worker, affordable, and whatever fields he's been in (design, publishing, writing, statistics) he's—for better AND worse—self-taught in all of them. http://jtlindroos.carbonmade.com/

Almost Published Blues

By Anonymous-9

A couple of days ago I had a near-death experience on the freeway. I was driving west on the 91 in Los Angeles County, when a giant dump truck blew a tire in front of me. The thing went off like a bomb, and as debris and swaths of rubber whipped toward me, I thought, "Noooo! I can't die before my novel is published!"  I guess that lets you know where my mind's at these days.

HARD BITE, THE NOVEL is my first full-length noir, and will be published by Blasted Heath this fall. I'm already hand-over-fist on the sequel, since I have a 2-book deal with BH. The time counting down to drop date is so excruciatingly slow I don't think gestating a real human could be this trying. I want to be busy cutting a trailer, but I can't cut a trailer until I have a book cover. I won't have a book cover until JT Lindroos gets around to rendering it. Could I get a cover designed faster from somebody else? You bet, but it wouldn't be a Lindroos cover. He's been in the biz for decades and designs for Edgar award-winning books. So I'll wait for Lindroos, thank you. Even though it's killing me.

Now let's get to the edit.  "Hard Man" and literary badass Allan Guthrie saw something in my manuscript and said he'd get back to me with changes. Allan wears many literary hats. He's not just a principal at Blasted Heath e-publishers, he's also a seasoned literary agent, a crime writer, and an Edgar nominee for his noir thriller KISS HER GOODBYE. Hoo boy was I ready for Allan to have at it! Every word of critique would be burned into my brain for reference and comparison. All my nasty mistakes and misfires were ready to get their butts whooped but good. I was ready to take my crit "like a man" and kill all my darlings, as Falkner said—whatever it took to whip that manuscript into shape.

Finally the day came. I opened the doc.x with Allan's Track Changes notations and... he found about twenty typos. One scene was too abrupt and needed padding. Another scene was briefly queried. That's it. My dreams of a Guthrie-punched manuscript that would forever cast golden guiding light on my career in crime writing fled faster than Chandler at a dry book signing.

Truth is, I pretty much beat my book to death before I sent it out for a second time, after extensive re-plotting and a rewrite.  15,000 words that I loved with all my heart (pronounced dull and boring by beta readers more objective and level-headed than I) were chopped out of the 50,000-word manuscript and replaced with 12,000 words of action and surprise. It took four years, but when it went out, it was ready. I could have self-published a whole year ago but I wouldn't have had JT Lindroos, or Blasted Heath, or Allan Guthrie. I figured the wait was worth it.

I started writing noir short stories in 2007 and the turning point was winning Spinetingler's Best Short Story on the Web competition in 2009. That encouragement, made possible by Brian Lindenmuth and Sandra Rutton who are guardian angels to crime writers in my opinion, inspired me to arrange life and work around writing. It's been an investment of five years to transform HARD BITE the short story into HARD BITE, THE NOVEL.

As I simmer and stew with the impatience of waiting for five years of work to be realized over at Blasted Heath, I ask myself if I'm willing to invest five more. Will another five years deliver the success and satisfaction I'm dreaming of? Will I ever see any money? I push those questions aside in favor of, "What else would you rather be doing?" And the answer is, "Nothing. I just wish I were writing more."

Conclusion: If what I wish I were doing is what I'm already doing, then the time is well spent. If that dump truck had taken me out on the freeway, then I'd still have steered my life as far as I could in the direction I wanted to go, with the time that I had. That's as much as any writer can do, I think.

Patience is a virtue.

The Crime Interviews: Volume 2, by Len Wanner

By Jay Stringer

I get sent a lot of ebooks to read and review. To be honest a lot of the stack up simply because I don;t have a dedicated e-reader yet. Soon I'll be treating myself to a shiny kindle touch, and then I'll catch up, but for now everything I read digitally is read on my laptop. And if I'm sat with laptop, then I tend to think I should be writing or researching (or playing Football Manager.) Sometimes a book lands on my inbox that just demands to be read straight away, and when you see one that collects interviews with Ray Banks, Tony Black, William McIlvanney and Helen Fitzgerald, well, I HAVE to check it out.

First let me get out of the way and say what the publisher BLASTED HEATH has to say;

In his foreword, Ian Rankin describes THE CRIME INTERVIEWS: VOLUME TWO as "Fascinating stuff, whether you are a fan of any particular author, or of the genre as a whole, or even of the wider world of Scottish and British Literature in contemporary times. In fact, I may just have to go back and read both volumes again…"

VOLUME ONE brought us page after page of unique insights into how writers think and into the professional secrets of some of the genre's greatest exponents. With THE CRIME INTERVIEWS: VOLUME TWO, once again Wanner's encyclopedic knowledge of Scottish crime fiction is put to expert use in his enthralling and revealing conversations with another inspired line-up of stars of tartan noir. His latest interview subjects include William McIlvanney, Tony Black, Doug Johnstone, Helen FitzGerald, Quintin Jardine, Gordon Ferris, Craig Russell, Douglas Lindsay, Ray Banks and Denise Mina.

I've interviewed writers, both in print and on podcasts, and it comes with a huge pressure to try and find good chat. Len Wanner as a talent for good chat. I'm sure there are more intelligent ways to put it, but it boils down to that. He knows how to sit and have good conversations with his subjects, and to get more involved and open responses than the usual oft-rehearsed lines.

There are running themes that run through the collection, such as Scottish identity and the changing mood of the country. McIlvanney's answers show a man who went from chronicling the lives of the working class, to campaigning for a political party, to now having a more distant and almost philosophical view of the game. Banks on the other hand speaks of letting your subtext do the talking. But this isn't a political book, nor is it a marketing brochure for Scottish fiction. It's a book full of good questions and interesting answers, and really comes to life when the authors start talking craft and content. Does Helen Fitzgerald start with character or plot? How does Tony Black manager to write whilst he does all that grappling with symbolism? How does Ray Banks maintain a balance between writing about violence and celebrating it? And why would I give you the answers to all these questions when you can pick up the book and let the authors do it themselves?