Juan Pablo Villalobos's Down the Rabbit Hole was the real winner of the 2011 Guardian first book award. It was so very much a first: the author's first book, translator Rosalind Harvey's first book as sole translator, and publisher And Other Stories's first book too. At the time, Mexican writer Villalobos and And Other Stories were known to only a handful of people in the UK; there was no local fan-club for him, or tried and tested marketing apparatus ready to kick into action for us. It was its longlisting and subsequent shortlisting that made all the difference in helping the novel reach people's attention. Its humour and quality – and the hunt for a pygmy hippo by the eccentric son of a Mexican drug lord – ensured it caught their imagination.
The first book award's impact is ongoing. Our handsomely produced trade paperback edition has gone to three printings so far. As a result of all the publicity, Villalobos's novel was picked up by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US and by other publishers around the world. And it continues to attract attention: Down the Rabbit Hole was one of five books chosen for the 2011 Summer Reads promotion run by Writers' Centre Norwich in Norfolk's libraries. The 100 copies purchased for library use were all borrowed within a single week.
And what did the shortlisting mean for us at And Other Stories? We launched our first titles in 2011 – the year Waterstones almost went bust and pretty much stopped ordering books for a while. Would we have survived without the award's publicity?
Back in 2009, I wrote a brainstorming article called Supply + Demand + Magic to air ideas and canvas support for what would become And Other Stories. Looking at the great books languishing unpublished (or unpublished in English at least) on the one hand, and the tame choices made by many UK publishers on the other, and fearing the recession and Amazon's growing power would both further limit publishing, I wondered if an agile group of people without large overheads could publish books beautiful and vital enough to keep until you die. There were many things I didn't understand when I wrote it, of course, but the thrust of the article was right, I think: to publish quality literary fiction properly without a fortune, Scandinavian crime fiction, or a Nobel prize winner or two in your backlist, you need some help. We obtained Grants for the arts through Arts Council England, but that wasn't enough. We also appealed for support to people who want to read something different.
The support promised led to And Other Stories's birth as a community interest company. We now have several hundred advance subscribers to each of our books, who make all the difference to our cash flow – and many of them also give us incredibly useful help in finding great titles. It's more fun than a simple slush pile: titles are suggested by networks of (often eminent) readers, writers and translators, and then discussed in our reading groups (Down the Rabbit Hole was brought to our Spanish-language reading group by its future translator, Rosalind Harvey). Of the eight titles on our 2011 and 2012 lists, all six translations have been found via our reading groups. Over and above these subscribers, our books are in bookshops. This mixture of subscriptions, grants and traditional retail sales keeps us afloat.
And yet … without the FBA, Down the Rabbit Hole might never have been noticed by UK readers. We published another debut novel in translation last year, Open Door by Iosi Havilio (it was ineligible for the first book award because it was was only published at the very end of 2011). Important critics and readers, including the leading Argentine critic Beatriz Sarlo, have remarked on how extraordinary it is. Beth Fowler's translation was highly praised by one of the best translators currently working from Spanish, Margaret Jull Costa. But it has not been widely noticed.
Havilio and Villalobos have both written books that deserve to be remembered for a very long time. We will publish the next books by both authors in 2013 and do everything we can to get them to readers in English. We don't expect our books to be immediate hits; a great book can have a slow fuse. So the fact that the Guardian first book award led to Down the Rabbit Hole becoming an overnight success was pure magic. Long may the award's magic continue.
And Other Stories are kindly offering five individually number-stamped first edition copies of Down the Rabbit Hole, signed by author and translator. Post in the comment thread below if you'd like one; copies will go to the first five posters.
