“A lot of people think they can self-publish and it’ll be okay”

What Steven asked Maria McCarthy and Bob Carling, formerly of Cultured Llama

The following was published by Steven Keevil on Sunday 2 February 2025 on Substack.

Married couple Maria McCarthy, a writer and poet, and Bob Carling, a book editor, recently ended their publishing project Cultured Llama. Steven met them at their home to learn more about the project and why it ended and to talk to them about how they met, what projects they are working on now, and whether they will work together again.

What was Cultured Llama?
Maria: Cultured Llama was an indie publishing house that started by accident. I was unwell at the time. I had been laid up with a bad back. This is always a dangerous time because I have big ideas and no money to back them up. I said, ‘Why don’t we publish a book in memory of a friend of mine?’ Karen McAndrew had recently died of cancer. She lived in Rochester. We did that book in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support and put on quite a big show down at the Sittingbourne theatre. We did an evening of spoken word and music and wrote in people like Los Alvedores to perform and Bob’s band. Bob had bought 10 ISBNs, and we thought, ‘What should we do with the rest?’ We opened it up to other submissions and because my interests and things that I write are poems, short stories and some non-fiction, we had that specifically in mind, the three areas that we would publish. We did it with no money, no business plan and we just went for it. We published 44 books in the end over seven years.

What was your main involvement in Cultured Llama? What was your role?
Maria: I was a poetry and fiction editor. I would look at the submissions and decide which we wanted to publish and work with the authors on editing their work and making it as good as possible. Anne-Marie Jordan was our non-fiction editor and also putting books in envelopes and things like that. We used to do that together. We called it stuffage. Plus, keeping up the website and social media and things like that.
Bob: My role was to make sure that the books looked right, typographical design, putting the books together. It was a coordination of things, commissioning the cover for the book. We used a very good friend for most of the design of the covers, Mark Holihan. He’s a great artist.
Maria: And poet.
Bob: And poet himself, yes. In fact, one of the Cultured Llama books was his own. The other thing I did, Maria mentioned we didn’t have a business model. I spent my life in publishing, as a commissioning editor mostly and I’d expected after the first book we did to spend a lot of time sitting down uploading what they call metadata which is all the stuff to do with the book, the blurb, how many pages, things like coding for where the book should go in a bookshop. Because booksellers need to know exactly what type of book it is, the coding is quite important. All of that boring stuff. I thought I’d have to do that for each of the individual book distributors. Amazon obviously, not just UK Amazon, but US Amazon and all the other Amazons, but all the other distributors. There’s about 40 or 50 main distributors of books.
Anyway, what we did was we used effectively a business model worked really well for us and that was to use one supplier, Ingram. Ingram are an international organisation that’s been in the publishing world for years, but you can do what’s called print-on-demand books. The point being that you upload the final design, cover design and the internal of the book to Ingram’s server, and then Ingram take all of the metadata that you’ve already uploaded to out to all the distributors. I didn’t have to do it, I just did it once, for each individual book and then Ingram did it all for us. It worked really well. The other point about that is that print-on-demand works really well for small independent publishers because you don’t have to print a whole load of books and warehouse them somewhere, embarrassed that you can’t sell them. Print-on-demand really does mean print-on-demand so when somebody orders a book through the Ingram process, through their distributors, Amazon or whoever, the order comes into Ingram, Ingram then fulfil that order and then they pay us in due course, for the books that we’ve sold. It can be a singleton book or thirty books or whatever, and you can also order them yourselves. We have book launches and that sort of thing. All of that worked extremely well for us.

With the Cultured Llama catalogue, was there a specific theme for the books?
Maria: Yeah well, I mean these are things that I write myself, things I’m interested in, and we had quite a range. We had some Medway writers, Philip Kane and, of course, Stephen Morris, the Do It Yourself: History of Music in Medway book, but we got people from all over the place. I think we turned down someone in New Zealand because the distribution would be quite difficult there, which is a shame because I really liked her writing. But it was all sorts of things really. We had an American poet, Bethany Pope, who now lives in China, and she was one of our first poetry books, and that was quite an interesting book about her grandparents mainly. One of her grandparents is of Native American origin, and she has quite an interesting personal history. We had another young writer, Richard Thomas, and then we started getting people coming to us like Sarah Selway, who’d been Canterbury Laureate a few years back. She had a book about the history of gardens, and she visited lots of gardens in Kent and the book was a hybrid book of her own visits with some poetry and memoir and photographs. That did get on the shelves in Waterstones Canterbury and we had to go moving it around from local interest to gardening to poetry. It was one of those hard to categorise books.
The short fiction collections, we published Maggie Harris, who’s well known in Medway and now lives in Broadstairs. Two short story collections by her with a Thanet interest in them. We started getting known, and people came to us with quite a variety of styles. Our non-fiction section was cultural non-fiction of things that interested us. To work on a book, to be an editor of a book and to promote it, you have to really like it. Some things that came to us, the writing was very good, but it just wasn’t something that interested me. I would say to any authors trying to get published, don’t get discouraged, another editor will love their work.

Why did it come to an end?
Maria: I got worn out. I have chronic fatigue, and when we started up the press, I said that I could manage four books a year, reading submissions and editing, working with the authors and doing the promotion and then got pushed up to six books because there were six manuscripts that I liked and we thought we could work with. I think our final year, we took on eight, and I had bereavement in the family that was quite hard to cope with, and sometimes you reassess what you’re doing at those times. I just said to Bob, ‘I can’t do it anymore.’ Bob would have been quite happy to continue, but we didn’t really want to pass it on to anyone else because we met too late in life to have children together, and Cultured Llama was our baby, and we weren’t prepared to foster it out. Not that I ever got paid for anything I did, but it was the longest notice I’d ever given because I think we decided about May, June that we would close down, but we were committed to three more books. We didn’t want to let those authors down. We continued with those. We continued making the books available for maybe four more years and by that stage, it was just a case of admin and accounts. ‘Who sold three books, and what royalties are they due?’ It was also, there’s nothing creative in this anymore. So, we closed down the whole thing.

If someone is reading this and is thinking about setting up publishing niche local books, what advice would you have for them?
Maria: Oh goodness.
Bob: Do what we did, which is not print and buy the books yourself, but get experts to do that for you. We used Ingram, as I said, but there are others. Don’t skimp on things like copy editing. You need to learn what copy editing is as opposed to just relying on your word processor to make sure that things are spelt correctly. Copy editing is much more than that. It’s looking for consistency throughout the book. It’s important to make sure that the book is presentable. Which is more than just simply making sure that you know your spelling is correct.
Maria: I think it is about making it look like a professional book because a lot of people think they can self-publish and it’ll be okay. Bob doesn’t read books, he looks at them and goes, ‘Oh dear, the typography in there is terrible.’ Don’t think about it too much and just go for what you want to do. We did jump in feet first, but it was a very Medway do-it-yourself attitude. We want to do this, let’s find a way to do it. I’ve seen other presses try to set up and try to get funding for what they do, set up limited companies and set up a framework and then only publish two books. Publish what you love is another thing.

Let’s go back to the beginning. Where were you born?
Maria: I was born in Yule, Epsom, Surrey.
Bob: I was born in Charing, near Ashford in 1956. I then spent most of my life travelling around a lot because my father ended up with a job in west Africa, in Ghana and Nigeria. Then went to university, I got married to someone else, not Maria. That marriage ended 20 years ago.

What brought you to the Medway Towns?
Maria: Well, it’s the down from London thing. I left Epsom when I was 19 and went to Thames Poly in southeast London and lived around southeast London for about ten years. It came to a stage where we wanted to buy a house, and we couldn’t do that in southeast London, so we moved down to Strood. That was in 1988. You know how it is with Medway: You never leave. We did try. Bob and I moved to Teynham for a few years, but it drew us back in.

Where did you meet?
Maria: Internet dating! I said ‘Are you a folk bloke because you look like one? You’ve got the beard for it.’ Then he took several months to reply to me.
Bob: The reason why I didn’t reply straight away is because my free subscription ran out, just at the time when I started to talk to contact Maria.
Maria: It was me who contacted you, very forward and modern.
Bob: Then some three months later, I had an offer like these organisations do to resubscribe free for another couple of months. I did and got in touch with Maria straight away, and apologised that I hadn’t been in touch (laughs). One thing led to another…

What did you study at university?
Maria: I went to Thames Polytechnic. We were at a gig, and MJ Hibbett said polys were like universities but for cooler people. I did a degree in Humanities. Then, I went back in my 40s and did an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Kent.
Bob: I did a Zoology degree, which was fantastic at Reading. I then went on to Southampton University to do an MSc in Pharmacology. I usually use the phrase, ‘I did drugs as a student.’ I then carried on to do a PhD, all free of course. I didn’t have a huge debt like kids do nowadays to study. This was all paid for by people’s taxes.

What was your MA focusing on?
Maria: We covered writing prose fiction and various other modules. My dissertation was the beginning of what became my short story collection. I think it was four short stories for my dissertation that were on the theme of Irish women living in England and their English-born daughters. It was me exploring my heritage, which I was starting to do in my forties. I do remember when I showed the first pair of stories. They were linked by the same characters but could be read as standalone stories and my tutor at the time said, ‘I think this has got legs and more than anything you need to find out where you came from.’ It took me several more years to actually work up the collection which was published in 2014, ‘As Long As It Takes’.
Is that collection still available?
Well, I have some copies (laughs). There are probably some secondhand copies floating around World of Books (there are!), but that was one of the Cultured Llama books we did.

What was your PhD in?
Bob: It was in Pharmacology. I can’t remember the exact title, but basically, it was looking at cell division control in the rat pancreas.
What can you tell us about cell division in the rat pancreas?
Bob: Well, the research caused my supervisor to have a couple of trips abroad. Not me. There was some interest in what I did. The thing about the pancreas is that it’s a bit like the liver and, to some extent, the salivary gland. The cell division in those organs is very much under the control of nerves that go into those organs. There’s a huge amount of interest in that for cancer reasons because the cell division goes out of control in cancerous cells. During the PhD, which was unbelievably tedious and boring, I just thought, ‘Do I really want to do this for the rest of my life?’ The answer was no. I went into publishing.

What was your entry role into publishing?
Bob: I was trainee copy editor. Which is why I mentioned copy editing earlier. Some of the bigger publishers try and cut down on copy editing, and you can tell, with a glaring spelling error or grammatical error. I enjoyed that, but what I wanted to do in publishing was to move on more to the development of new books and commissioning.

How did you get into that?
My boss at the company I was working for at the time offered me a job as a coordinator of lexicography, dictionaries. It wasn’t quite what I wanted to do, but I enjoyed it immensely. That involved commissioning people to write entries for dictionaries. The whole thing about coordinating and project managing dictionaries. I then moved companies to another one as a commissioning editor, a fully-fledged commissioning editor with that experience behind me. That was a company called Chapman and Hall. Chapman and Hall were the publishers of Dickens and Thackeray, but in the 60s, they ditched the literary side of publishing and just concentrated on what was a growth area then, STM publishing, Science, Technical, Medical. I ended up as an ecology editor and that gave me the opportunity to interact with experts on biodiversity. I actually used the word biodiversity long before it became hip, and everybody understood what biodiversity meant.

Do you have a current official occupation?
Maria: I don’t. Eventually, by accident, I got into working for charities and in the voluntary sector. That was while my children were small and I was living in southeast London. I got involved in a local community centre, I went on to various committees and eventually got some paid work and the last full-time job I had was as the first worker for Medway and Swale Advocacy Partnerships, where I worked for seven years developing advocacy for people with severe injury and mental health problems. I became ill shortly before my 40th birthday, which was eventually diagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome, and I haven’t been able to work full-time since then.
Bob: I am semi-retired. I’m still acting as a publishing consultant, essentially helping people to get their book published, advising them on contracts with publishers. Most of the work I do is advising people on how to set up their own self-publishing entity.
If someone locally is considering setting up a niche publisher, you’re available for consultation?
Absolutely.

Do you have any additional roles, paid or unpaid currently?
Maria: I don’t have anything. I get tempted sometimes to get more involved. The last thing I did was I was the secretary for MM2K, Medway Music 2000. I joined thinking I’d quite like to be involved in the Parklife festival and then it lost its funding that year. It wasn’t my fault (laughs).
Bob: I’m involved with a band, Acoustic Architects, and I’m involved in the occasional approaching of organisations for funding for a particular musical project. Sea Folk Sing was one, and the other one was a project with composer Anna Braithwaite called Hulked. It was essentially the idea of celebrating the hulks that are in the Medway mud, sailing barges and that sort of thing. Writing songs, celebrating them with prose.
Maria: And creating a sound walk.
Bob: You can now enjoy the sound walk by going to Lower Halstow and scanning a QR code or downloading the software before you go there. You can walk along the seashore there and enjoy some songs, prose and poetry about the hulks in the Medway mud.
Maria: You haven’t mentioned your urology support group.
Bob: I had the misfortune of prostate cancer a little while ago. Diagnosed by accident which was nice. The amazing thing about prostate cancer is that it’s asymptomatic for most men, and often people find out that they’ve got prostate cancer by accident. Mine was found out because I had a bad knee, and I had a scan which went further up to my pelvis, and the GP said, ‘Your knee’s fin,e but the prostate isn’t.’ As a result of that experience, I got involved with what’s called the Urology Support Group West Kent, which is a local group that advises people about what to do if they’re diagnosed with prostate cancer and other urological cancers. Prostate is more common than the others. I run their website and commission various speakers to come and speak about prostate cancer and related issues. We meet every other month up at the Gillingham golf course.
Message for the readers: Get your knees checked out.
Bob: (laughs) It’s interesting how people accidentally find out. If you’re a man 50 or older, you can actually ask for a PSA. PSA is a measure of a particular antigen that the prostate produces. In itself, that PSA test is a blood test. It’s very easy to do. The PSA test is not a great predictor of prostate cancer, but it is an indicator that can lead you to other investigations.

You’re currently working on a new book?
Maria: Yes, the book is finished. it’s actually a hybrid. It’s got memoir, poetry and short fiction, and it’s mainly around the theme of me being second-generation Irish. It’s now going to be called ‘Learning to be Irish’ and published with Siglum Publishing. That’s the first time I will have had an entire book published by someone other than Cultured Llama.

You’ve recently launched a Substack?
Maria: I think my first one was on the day of the General Election in July last year. I’ve done about six months’ worth now. It tends to be pretty memoir-based. I started off with some pieces that I’d written some time ago for a memoir that never got published. I had all these bits that I adapted, edited and shortened. It just seems to be anything that particularly catches my imagination that week or experiences I’ve had. Recently, I had a photo shoot with Michi Masumi and wrote about the experience of being a photographic model, particularly as somebody that doesn’t like having a photograph taken. There’s been a lot about grief because I lost my brother two years ago and working through that. All sorts of subjects, and it’s free.

Do you play any musical instruments?
Maria: I learned the violin as a child and gave that up when I started a Saturday job in Woolworths and discovered boys. I did pick it up again during the pandemic, but it’s not for public. Also, the recorder and a tin whistle. But I enjoy singing and I sing in Bob’s Community Choir.
Bob: I taught myself to play guitar when I was a kid. My mum gave me paid piano lessons when I was young. I hated it, absolutely hated it, because it didn’t seem to relate to the real world. When you’re just doing scales on the piano, you just think, ‘Oh, I just want to play a song’. There’s a lesson in there for people who teach piano, I think. Anyway, my mum bought me a guitar, and I absolutely adored it. I started playing Beatles songs and old R&B songs and realised I could actually play some of these. I’ve played guitar ever since I was about eight or nine something like that. As Maria mentioned, I’m now involved with running a community choir.

Where’s your community choir?
Bob: The community choir meets at the Oast community centre in Rainham, so we call ourselves the Oast House Community Choir.
How did that come about?
Bob: A friend of mine was approached to start up a community choir. She didn’t have the capacity and suggested me. I then got in touch with various people and searched around for a location. The Oast in Rainham seemed a good place to meet and it grew.
Maria: It started off with about five people, and you were a bit despondent of that, and then they all brought people along the next week and it’s a lovely crowd of people there.
Bob: It’s great fun. It stretches me musically because I’m not really a choral person. As I say, I’m a self-taught guitarist, and I just love songs and songwriting. The choir themselves are so enthusiastic. We don’t take ourselves terribly seriously. We don’t have auditions, we don’t expect people to read music or anything like that, the whole idea is just to come along and enjoy the singing.

Who has been the best Prime Minister of your lifetime?
Maria: Oh, I knew this was going to come. I’ve lived through quite a few Prime Ministers. I think we were all very hopeful about Tony Blair. We really thought things could only get better, but they didn’t, and I know what Bob is going to say. He’s going to talk about the one that never was.
Bob: John Smith. He would have been a superb Prime Minister. Though they said the same about Blair.

Where do you like to go for dinner in Medway?
Maria: This is a difficult one because I’m celiac, lactose intolerant, and pescatarian. There are very few choices. I’ve recently tried Fish at 55, and the chef there says they can adapt anything to eliminate gluten and dairy from it. I’ve enjoyed some meals there.
Bob: Similar because we go together.
Maria: It’s always a trial finding somewhere to eat.
Bob: People feel it’s just the same as an intolerance.
Maria: It’s an autoimmune disease.
Bob: There are pubs that do excellent work outside of Medway, and it would be good if a pub in Medway picked up that baton.

What do you currently do to unwind?
Maria: I like doing crafts. I enjoy sometimes going to the craft sessions where you can just sit and craft at Unravel and Unwind. Sometimes I find when I’m working on some sewing that something I’ve been trying to work out in my writing happens.
Bob: Music. That’s the thing I do. I don’t read a huge amount, but when I do read, I find that very relaxing. It depends on what I’m reading of course, but music, sitting down trying to work out chord sequence. The other thing I love to do is songwriting. I’m not fantastic at words, but tunes and chord sequencing, because of my interest in that, come to me fairly easily.
Maria: You know someone who is good at words.
Has there been a collaboration?
Bob: There has.
Maria: I think there has been about three songs in the 18 years we’ve been together.
Bob: It’s not a common thing. I’d like to do more.

Footnotes

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

You can read our previous interviews here.

If you want to suggest ideas or send tips for people to interview, email Steven.

Steven Keevil still manages to watch hundreds of films a year. He recommends Problemista. He listened to no music whilst writing this but recommends reading The Man of Steel by Brian Michael Bendis.