Absolute Bollocks

"Leading the charge is Heidi James, the 33-year-old owner and sole employee of Social Disease, a new kind of publishing company. It does most of its marketing and talent scouting on the internet and relies on new print on demand technology to keep its costs sufficiently low to ensure that, even if it can't compete with the publishing behemoths, it won't be crushed by them anytime soon either.

James sums up Social Disease's raison d'être as: "Zadie Smith is not fucking interesting", and neither are Monica Ali and the dozens of other writers of similar social comedies that emerged in the wake of White Teeth's huge success. "All this postmodern irony is just so dull," James explains. "And I realised that I really hate the homogeneity of the publishing world where it's next to impossible to get genuinely interesting work published. The big publishing houses would have you believe that there isn't a market for new and exciting work that takes a few risks and makes a demand on it's readers, but that's bollocks. Absolute bollocks.""