This may be no bad thing: to say why CBe is publishing the books, one by one, that it does. CBe is a one-person operation, publishing entirely on personal taste, and if it sometimes mingles with the Big People – the shortlists, the prizes – that doesn’t mean that it sells accordingly, because it doesn’t have the resources (marketing, publicity) to capitalise on that, so I may as well make play with what it does have, and attempt to turn its lack of resources into an advantage rather than the opposite.
First up will be a post on the Michael Hofmann book, probably on Monday. If, reading it, you get the feeling you’re being encouraged to buy the book, that this is a selling piece, you won’t be wrong. This is what publishers do: put stuff out there that they want to share, and because they’ve invested some cash in this process they want to share it with as many people as they can reach. But I promise that the posts will not include the following words: passion, creative, tour de force, accessible, discount. Some of the posts will meander. They’ll be about how each book came to me, and the kind of personal engagement that doesn’t translate into the conventions of the blurb, or even the website page. They’ll be a kind of in-brief review of the book, a very subjective one, admittedly, but at least it might start the ball rolling.
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