Entitled “Indie Presses Find a Home on Campuses,” the piece focuses on the handful of presses located on university campuses, what the advantages are the presses and the universities, and how this model functions.

When South End Press relocated from Cambridge, Mass., to the Brooklyn campus of Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York last fall, it joined a handful of presses that have formed partnerships with universities. In some cases, these presses have been launched by academic institutions, which have created such imprints as Open Letter at the URochester or Apprentice House at Loyola University in Baltimore. No matter the ownership, these houses more closely resemble indie presses like Akashic Books than traditional university presses with their more scholarly bent and editorial boards. [. . .]

Campus presses can strengthen existing academic and outreach programs as well as assist universities in developing new ones. When poetry publisher Alice James Books began forging what has grown into a 15-year relationship with the University of Maine at Farmington, it coincided with the university’s decision to offer a B.F.A. in creative writing. “The B.F.A. program existed a few years before Alice James came along, but we were fairly close on the heels, and definitely helped shape the program into what it is today,” said executive director Carey Salerno. This summer the press will participate in a new University of Maine at Farmington program for younger students, a weeklong writing camp for high schoolers.

There’s a section about Open Letter, Three Percent, and the as well, pointing out the various ways the Press and academic programs are intertwined.

It’s interesting to me how many non-university presses there are at universities these days—including a few that I wasn’t previously aware of, such as Ahsahta Press and Apprentice House. There’s a long article that could be written here about the fall of the current publishing model and how this arrangement offers hope for the future of literary publishing. . . . But that’s for another day. In the meantime, one book that really gets into this issue, and is definitely worth checking out, is The Business of Books by Andre Schiffrin.

Right from the start she hits one the bleak cycle of translations in today’s book market:

A vicious cycle develops where the difficulty of placing books in the US makes it less likely foreign publishers and agents will invest in packaging their authors to submit here, which makes it harder for US editors to develop an understanding of foreign markets and what authors might be the best match for their audience. This, in turn, arguably contributes to the scattershot nature of publishing translations here and the chances that the books that do get published will find success.

And if you want to catch a glimpse of the differences in editorial practices between a small press and a large one, check this out:

There is no comparably mature translation market for any one language in the English speaking world, and the fact that books coming into the American market come from many different countries and languages makes it harder for editors here to develop the expertise in what any market has to offer, and which books from that country have the best shot of appealing to American readers. The books that are sold for translation here are more likely to come through the handful of US agents with close ties to one region or another, who are themselves usually working through professional relationships with particular agents or publishers abroad. What books by foreign authors that end up crossing an American editor’s desk, then, depends in no small part on chance and good connections. Rachel Kahan, a Senior Editor at Putnam who reads fluently in Spanish, admits, “If they don’t have a US agent and they aren’t being conspicuously packaged for the US sale, which is the case a lot of the time, I tend to luck into things.”

There are some instances where the absence of an American agent offers a savvy editor the advantage of speed, but in most cases American representation makes things easier.

“Not all editors in the business have relationships with their colleagues overseas or with foreign agents, so if there’s an American on board, I think in some cases it lends the project a little more visibility,” said Kahan. “And also if there’s an American agent there’s usually a translation or a partial translation of the book itself. That [US] subagent will have packaged it in a way that’s the most accessible and maximizes its potential for the American market. Whereas when it’s been an author that I’ve discovered, then I’m doing all of that work myself. [I’m] the one saying, ‘You really have to trust me here, I think this is going to work, I’m staking my reputation on it.’”

The article—which you should really read in its entirety—ends on a much more positive note than it begins, although for a literary elitist like myself, it’s a bit bittersweet . . . Anyway, talking about how to make a book in translation sell:

Kahan emphatically agrees, citing authors Marek Halter, the French-speaking author of religious historical fiction whose books she acquired while working at Crown, and Luis Miguel Rocha, the Portuguese author of the thrillers The Last Pope and The Holy Bullet, which she publishes at Putnam.

“Both speak reasonably good English and are very charismatic and very interesting,” says Kahan, “and in both cases they came to New York, they met our sales people, they were involved in the publicity of the book. And, yes, that made a really big difference.”

These success stories have given Kahan the impetus to continue to look for great authors from abroad. “I know it’s very often said, Americans don’t read books in translation, and publishers aren’t interested in foreign writers, and that is not the case,” she asserts. “We’re not buying as much in other languages as our counterparts overseas are, but we are definitely buying them and there are certainly ones who break out. The first book I bought by Marek Halter [Sarah] has sold over 200,000 copies. They do work. They’re harder to make work, there’s no doubt about that, but there’s this idea that American publishers just throw up a wall and don’t take a chance on writers who don’t write in English, and I don’t think that’s the case.”

Scott Esposito: Since November, newspapers have been full of reports of layoffs and cutbacks at large New York publishers, and the general mood one gets from reading these reports is gloom. Would you agree or disagree that things are gloomy for publishing right now?

Richard Nash: There are several distinct things going on at once. The first is the macro-economic problem which is indeed giving cause for gloom as it has caused a serious drop on aggregate adult trade book sales, greater than any recession heretofore.

The second is the shift on what media consumers purchase, and how they consume it, occurring for books, music, television and film—because it is the smallest of those industries, and because its technology—the printed book—was the most robust and fine-tuned of the analog technologies, it is only know we’re starting to see the impact. And the impact is currently less on the industry itself; it’s more that the cumulative effect of the changes from other industries, chiefly the amount of content consumed online, is drawing people away from the printed book format. The shift can be cause for gloom if you’re of the handwringing temperament, but it is far more an opportunity to rid the publishing business of a lot of cant and laziness and arrogance.

The third is the effect of all the other, non-consumer-facing change sin technology, especially that of supply chain management, in combination with the above two trends. Basically, retailers and wholesalers have been rapidly shifting risk from themselves back onto the publisher. Retailers order fewer and fewer copies of each book, believing that if the book is a failure, they’ll be stuck with less slow-moving inventory, and if it is a success the publisher can just reprint and ship them more. Retailers and wholesalers share less of the burden of printing books on spec., the publisher ever more. This has been especially hard on independent publishers, without the capital/cash flow to be doing extra lower profit margin printings of the book, and getting stuck with higher initial units costs because they’re printing 2500 copies rather than 3500 copies of an average title. The macroeconomic situation has made this worse, and the collapse in music sales (pace the second observation) has hurt retailers like Tower, Virgin, Borders, putting more pressure on the books to perform . . . This phenomenon is cause for gloom, though it has been going on for years and won’t stop really until there’s been a significant shift to digital download of books, and to subscriptions for direct-to—consumer physical books.

And his comments about Anita Elberse’s article on the blockbuster model and how this model will play out over time are both hilarious and accurate:

RN: Oh she’s really not done much research—she’s only looked at the corporate model, and developed theories about what works on their system. Which is self-fulfilling, since their system is designed to work that model. It’s really quite dense. Almost hare-brained. [. . .]

Corporate houses were already shifting to publishing fewer titles, and the recession will accelerate that process. They will continue to follow Elberse’s model, which will cause them to become smaller and smaller companies, since chasing blockbusters has never worked in books except one or two years out of every four or five, when they’re lucky. There will be layoffs in all the down years, which will be the majority, until they’re really just backlists with a sporadic hit factory attached.

All of Scott’s interviews are really interesting, in part because there does seem to be a greater awareness among independent presses about how things are changing and about what business models/strategies need to be instituted in order to survive and continue serving the reading public.

And the answer is never v-books. Although I’m sure these will help offset the

Paradoxically, the proliferation of digital media that is arguably the biggest threat to traditional publishing also offers authors more opportunities than ever to distribute and promote their work. The catch: In order to do that effectively, authors increasingly must transcend their words and become brands. [. . .]

In today’s fickle marketplace, the Internet—with blogs, videos, Twitter, and other promotional tools like Amazon’s Author Stores—is the modern-day equivalent to hand-selling. [. . .] In a way, authors are empowered in this new model, provided they can leverage their networks into living, breathing communities who have a stake in—and benefit from—an author’s ballooning platform.

With the examples in the article being people like James Patterson, John Grisham, and Mitch Albom (where’s Tom Clancy? Dude has videogames named after him), I’m glad Jill Priluck pointed out the insanity and danger of this all:

The overemphasis on platforms means that authors sink into brand-speak to get their projects sold, even though their writing—and often their reputations—gets short-circuited. With limited choices, they trade depth for instant gratification, visibility, and higher advances. Ironically, their longevity, supposedly the marker of a good brand, falls by the wayside. It seems that unlike a detergent or a car, an author who is branded too quickly will often fizzle out just as fast.

This “author as product” mentality is pretty insane and really devalues the work itself. It also completely fits in with the changes that have gone on in the publishing world over the past couple decades.

Through mergers and corporate acquisitions, any “branding” that publishing lines once had (and by “brand,” I mean editorial vision and identity, something readers can recognize and appreciate, not the Open Letter XBox game) has been completely dissolved, and the name on the spine of a lot of books is sort of meaningless. So the author’s name/reputation/brand is more important than the publishing line, something that is the exact opposite at independent houses, which are often introducing unknown authors to the reading public.

Andre Schriffrin’s The Business of Books (which should be required reading for anyone in publishing, but is strangely out-of-print) gets into this exact issue, especially when he takes Michael Korda to task for his lackadaisical attitude toward this shift—and the cheapening of publishing as a whole—in his publishing memoir, Another Life:

Korda describes these authors, on which the firm’s fortunes were increasingly to rely, with remarkable disdain. They are demanding, their clothing is vulgar, they do not know the right places in London at which to order custom-made shoes, or the appropriate restaurants at which to eat—subjects on which Korda is very well informed. At the same time, he describes their books as the unavoidable wave of the future as publishing becomes increasingly tied to the entertainment industry, and the styles and values of Hollywood become dominant. Celebrity books are the titles that will make or break firms and Korda, with his boss, Richard Snyder, are determined that it will be the former.

In the time Simon & Schuster was bought by Viacom, owners of Paramount Pictures, and for a brief while it was even renamed Paramount Books. While Korda is frank in describing the economic pressures of these changes, he is nonetheless firmly wedded to the assumption that these are the books on which publishing should focus, and he is proud of his successes with them, if not of his associations with their authors.

Schiffrin then related a bit about Korda attacking Harold Robbins for Robbins’s shame at going from a literary author to a commercial one, concluding:

It seems that in today’s publishing it is only authors who despise themselves for selling out. Publishers merely anticipate inevitable trends.

We did get a rather lengthy comment about this post, essentially defending the blockbuster model. (In addition to a really interesting one about B&N and Borders.) “Awasky” brought up some interesting points, and since this sort of “business of publishing” thing is an obsession of mine, I thought I’d reprint and respond to some of his/her points. (And take a chance to publicly thank him/her for responding in such detail.) If anyone has any thoughts, objections, etc., etc., please feel free to post them below.

As someone who works for one of the big trade publishing houses, I was sent the WSJ article. From what I’ve seen within the industry, it’s completely right. At the moment, the only books whose sales continue to be strong are the blockbusters—if publishing is going to survive at all, it needs to focus its attention on blockbusters rather than splitting that attention over hundreds (or thousands) of books that barely break even.

I have to say, this seems a bit tautological. Of course the blockbusters are the only books whose sales continue to be strong—that’s why they’re blockbusters! But no, seriously, my objection isn’t with the attention paid to books that are taking off, or have found an audience, it’s the idea of paying obscene advances in hopes of creating a blockbuster. Oh, and I totally agree—Elberse does describe how the industry tends to function. That doesn’t mean it has to function that way, or that this current dominant model is the best way for publishers to function.

By applying moral good or evil to what is the reality of the book publishing business right now, I find I have to object to most of the things you say in this post.

There’s something that’s been nagging at me ever since I read this article . . . I’m not sure I can properly articulate it, but it seems to me that when a publisher decides to pay $X million for the rights to a book, plus $XXX to market it, to ensure that it’s everywhere—in stores, on the radio, in your TV—when it comes out, to basically ensure that this book has penetrated mass culture, that publisher is impacting the world in ways that go beyond simple dollars and cents, and should take that responsibility seriously. Books are not toothpaste. What is read, discussed, and thought about by thousands of people is more meaningful than “shifting product.” Yes, publishers need to stay in business, and it is a business, but in my opinion, it’s a special sort of business.

1 – You’re presenting commercial success and quality as mutually exclusive (which they aren’t); assuming that publishers can either line their greedy pockets or produce “culture.” Believe me, most people in this business are here for the love of books, not the money.

Yeah, I know. I do that a lot. And it’s true—not all best-sellers are crap, and not all books that sell like crap are works of genius. Personally, I’m not a fan of Patricia Cornwell, James Patterson, or Glenn Beck’s (!!! Oh dear God, everyone should check out ) The Christmas Sweater (the top three current NY Times bestsellers), and wouldn’t consider these “literary” books, but someone might. (Not sure who, but still.)

2 – You refer to books with big advances as undeserving. Undeserving? I’m not going to argue the literary merit of Dewey, but that book more than made back its advance and is one of the reasons Hachette is the only publisher that seems to be doing well right now. Advances are calculated based on expected sales. So, big sales=big advances. That’s good business. Advances aren’t some grade publishers are giving out for effort.

Although in the WSJ article, Elberse points out that big advances=big marketing budgets, which generally=big sales. So it’s more complicated than this. The expectations are premised upon what a publisher thinks it can do with a book, not just what a book will sell if you throw it out there to let the readers decide.

3 – You hold up Penguin Classics as a purveyor of culture. Penguin Classics publishes classics because they are public domain and therefore free. The only cost is production. If that was not the case, Bronte and Melville wouldn’t be readily available. Never mind the fact that “classics” are classics because everyone says they are—they have proven track records and are guaranteed sellers as long as there’s an expectation that a well-read person will have read these books. Don’t kid yourself that books are classics based strictly on merit—it has as much to do with tradition and historical perspective as what’s between the covers. And do you honestly believe these books didn’t face market pressures in their own time?

I probably didn’t explain this well—and won’t now—but I had in mind the idea that these books have sold more over the long terms than a lot of best-selling books do over the short term. There’s something to be said for sticking with a book until it finds its audience in contrast to a quick hit.

4 – It’s all well and good to complain about the attention paid to bestsellers, but bestsellers are called that because they sell. And just throwing money and publicity at a book is not enough to make it one (I give you The Interpretation of Murder), so it’s not like publishers are being arbiters of culture, choosing to focus on these books because they think they are more worthy. I can point to the shelves and shelves of amazing books my company has published that have sold less than 3,000 copies, most of which were bought by an editor who believed in the books merit in spite of its lack of commercial potential. And publishing these books is doing no good for either the publishers or the authors. So publishers try to focus their resources on the books they think they will sell. That’s it. You expect people whose livelihoods depend on sales of these books to make bad business choices? We often do, which is a lot of the problem. But if you want art for art’s sake, there are plenty of charities for that.

There are? Will they fund Open Letter? I feel like this is shifting a bit . . . Bestsellers are one thing, the “blockbuster model” that I was writing about is another.

5 – Why are you complaining about bestsellers squeezing out other books? Do you have any idea how many books are published every year?

Yes. Approximately not counting p.o.d. or short run titles. We even have a pretty good handle on how many of those books are translations.

Even in this recession, my company is publishing more books next year than it ever has before. We are in no danger of seeing the number of new books each year drop below the tens of thousands. Those books are out there right now. If you don’t want to read Dewey, it’s not like there aren’t other options.

Again, that’s not really what I was talking about. Of course there are thousands of books out there to read—hundred(s) of which we discuss here on this website. And there are hundreds of others we’d love to have the time/energy to write about. That still doesn’t mean that the reliance on big advance blockbusters isn’t a bit off kilter.

So it seems that the problem as you present it is not that there aren’t plenty of books, which believe me, there are, but that the media and the booksellers pay attention to ones you think are unworthy. And I’m sorry for that, but people will always being reading things you might disapprove of, and if we want to survive as an industry, we have to sell books to those people.

I have no problem selling books to readers. Or, to put it more accurately, selling heap loads of books to boat loads of readers. (Like the hundreds of thousands of people we hope are anxiously awaiting Jan Kjaerstad’s The Conqueror.) This conversation has drifted away from the discussion of the “blockbuster model,” which involves a huge investment based on (in my opinion) flimsy principles, in hopes of having to sell an astronomical number of copies in order to stay in business and remain profitable, to more about bestsellers. I don’t begrudge commercial publishers selling lots of copies of books (big houses do some really great books, and as a business it’s their prerogative to make as much money as possible), I just think there are might be saner business models for publishers that might be even more stable and successful, and could lead to a more interesting, diverse book culture that engages lots of different groups of readers, even if there are only 3,000 people interested in a particular title.

One of the biggest problems facing publishing right now is that is filled with people who are making decisions based on love of books, not on business. I should just point to the number of layoffs happening in book publishing right now as proof that we have not been focusing on the bottom line nearly enough. We are businesses; to survive we have to start acting like businesses. To expect us to act like patrons of the arts is ludicrous.

Exactly. And maybe these layoffs are happening because the business model publishers are relying upon needs to be tweaked a bit. One thing that inevitably gets left out of conversations/articles like this is that there are presses that are essentially patrons of the arts and that this nonprofit model (or university press model, or hybrid of the two, or whatever) is equally valid to the commercial “blockbuster” model. These presses serve a slightly different audience, and are guided by different goals and missions. They might publish books that people who read (or watch, or listen to) Glenn Beck might not “get,” but that doesn’t mean that these books aren’t appreciated, enjoyed, treasured, etc. These presses also face a different set of problems: undercapitalized due to the paucity of funding options in our country for literature, have a more difficult time getting their books into stores, don’t receive as much media coverage for their titles, etc. It’s not a perfect model, but it does exists, and has worked really well for a good number of presses that function to benefit culture and don’t gamble on paying big bucks for potentially big books.

The “blockbuster model” is exactly what it sounds like: publishers pay millions in advances for high-profile books ($2.5 mill to Sarah Silverman, $1.25 mill for fricking Dewey, the list goes on) in hopes of finding a “mega-hit” that makes up for the mediocre sales of the rest of its list. Or, in business-speak:

Most large media firms make outsized investments to acquire and market a small number of titles with strong hit potential, and bank on their sales to make up for middling performance in the rest of their catalogs.

OK, yes, that’s a model. A dominant one in fact. One that—to many—seems a bit rocky, especially when you consider how publishers decide which titles to throw their checkbooks at:

Rather than putting all its eggs in one basket, wouldn’t it be smarter for a publisher to place a larger number of smaller bets — particularly in today’s harsh economic climate?

Hardly. Despite its double-or-nothing daring, the blockbuster strategy remains the most sensible approach to lasting success.

Consider, first, how these bets come about. Given the variability in execution in books, and the constantly shifting tastes of consumers, it is extremely difficult to forecast demand for a new title. The one useful indicator of commercial potential is its resemblance to an existing bestseller, so a project can be tagged, say, “the next Tipping Point“ or “a hipper Harry Potter.” This similarity is an indicator that’s evident to any editor or publisher who sees the proposal — and thanks to busy agents, many do. As a consequence, there is heavy convergence of interest on certain properties, triggering competitive bidding situations.

“It’s like Marley & Me meets The Bridges of Madison County.” Hold on while I gag. . . . Yes, this sort of “this book is like best-seller exhibit A, so it will be a best-seller as well” powers a lot of editorial decisions. But is this really a good thing?

(This article absolutely drives me crazy. It’s like my economics classes—I completely agree on the description of the situation and how it works, but when it comes to value judgments on whether this situation is “good” or not, I feel diametrically opposed to what business people stand for.)

It’s clear that Elberse is valuing is the business of business, the business of profit making, over the cultural contributions publishers can, and do, make. Spend big bucks, put a lot of weight behind the book, make a ton of money, move onto next mega-hit. (cringing)

At least she sort of recognizes part of the potential downfall of this model:

When a publisher spends an inordinate amount on an acquisition, it will do everything in its power to make that project a market success. Most importantly, this means supporting the book with higher-than-average marketing, advertising and distribution support — which is exactly how Grand Central handled Dewey‘s launch. To do otherwise would be foolish: If a product like Dewey fails to draw readers, Grand Central knows its profitability will be severely hurt. With such high stakes and money tied up in a few big projects in the pipeline, the need to score big with a next project becomes more pressing, and the process repeats itself. The result is a spiral of ever-increasing bets on the most promising concepts, creating a “blockbuster trap.”

So, in this trap, publishers keep spending more money to get bigger books with bigger potential returns, causing them to spend even more money on even bigger books. . . . I hear that sort of idea worked out really well for the banking industry, so why not? Besides, you can’t break out of the cycle, right?

But what would happen if a publisher like Grand Central decided to stop making large bids like the one it placed on “Dewey” and systematically walked away from the most sought-after — and therefore expensive — new properties?

First, agents would stop sending such a publisher their most
promising book proposals. “If you are constantly backing out of big-ticket auctions, your list is going to hurt,” is how one publishing executive explains it. “You are going to get a stigma that you don’t play for the big ones, and you are going to get shunned out. Agents will no longer consider you for what they feel are their best projects.” Publishers can’t afford to cost-save themselves out of the market. Even if they could develop extraordinary competence in finding gold in the “slush pile” of hundreds of pieces of unsolicited material received each week, the dividends would be limited. After one success, the talent the publisher had nurtured would discover the value of an agent.

Uggghh . . . But wait, there’s more:

Book retailers like Borders and Barnes & Noble want to see evidence that a book is worthy of their scarce resources. They like nothing better than to know that a book publisher has made a significant push for a title and is planning an extensive marketing campaign. In most media markets, support from the biggest retailers is decisive. A significant share of books is bought on impulse, so significant shelf space and room on display tables (“pile ‘em high and watch ‘em fly” tactics) are particularly important. A blockbuster strategy helps retailers to use their resources effectively, too.

Yeah, no, that’s great. Who really gives a shit about quality, about culture, about the benefits of reading? In my opinion, this is one of the main reasons our industry is in trouble, and one of the causes for the so-called “decline in reading.” The primary examples used in this article—Dewey, Nicholas Sparks—are not good books/writers. But crappy books like this are force fed through the system because of this “all-or-nothing” sort of model. Reputation and “marketability” lead to undeserved astronomical advances, causing publishers to promote these books at the expense of real literature, leading impersonal box stores to assault the eyes and sensibilities of readers.

Again, in my opinion, this sort of short-term payoff mentality that runs throughout this sort of publishing—and business schools—damages culture. Maybe it’s fine for cookbook publishing or whatever, but in terms of literature, I truly believe that we have to take a more rational, tempered, long-term approach. Look at the Penguin Classics list. Included are tons of the greatest authors of all time and works that have survived. That have added something to our culture as a whole, that weren’t published just to try and make back the $1 million advance.

I had some hope that the financial collapse would bring everyone back to earth and back to the idea that you can “make enough money” instead of always trying to drive up profit margins in an industry that has never been particularly profitable.

Unfortunately, if this “blockbuster” mentality continues to be “the most sensible approach to lasting success” we’re in a lot of trouble. Thank god for university presses and nonprofits. And I want to personally thank Ms. Elberse for giving me something to get all fired up about, and for clearly laying out (in an negative image sort of way) all the reasons why people need to support nonprofit presses (and independents) in order for real literary culture to survive.

Oddly enough, it seems like Australia has a related, yet different sort of problem—publishers there are lobbying to keep a ban on importing cheap editions of books:

The Council of Australian Governments decided last week to ask the Productivity Commission to review copyright laws restricting the parallel importation of books.

These laws give the Australian copyright owner control over who is allowed to import books subject to the 30-day rule. Under this rule, local publishers must supply a book within 30 days of its publication overseas, otherwise booksellers can import directly from the foreign publisher. (via )

Behind this restriction seems to lie a much bigger problem of distribution. Something’s wrong when it could take more than 30 days to supply a copy of a published book. (I’ve been thinking a lot about distribution recently—it’s a side-effect of doing sales calls—and was planning to write a long post about this today . . . )

Miller briefly hits on the various gate keepers of book culture: agents, editors, critics.

It really is insane to think about all that goes into making a single book “take off.” Especially when you consider that over 250,000 books are published a year—over 12,000 of which are works of fiction and poetry. Throw in there that the average American (according to the NEA) reads about 4 books a year and it seems almost impossible that any book (especially a work of literary fiction) rises above the fray. (Conversely, the idea that 250,000 books are published seems equally crazy. It’s as if any off-the-wall proposal can find a publisher out there.)

It would take tomes to fully explore and explain this issue, but Miller gets some good quotes/viewpoints into his piece, especially from Lorin Stein and Ira Silverberg:

Ira Silverberg, an agent at Sterling Lord Literistic who represents Sam Lipsyte, Christopher Sorrentino and Rene Steinke, puts it another way: “We are the first line of defense—we keep it safe to read in America, because most of the stuff that people write is shit.”

We generally don’t work with many agents for Open Letter titles. (Of our first 14 acquisitions, 5 were agented.) Most of the time we work with foreign publishers or the author him/herself. The fact that the book was published elsewhere takes the place of the vetting process that agents serve for American writers. (Still, there’s a lot of dreck out there . . .)

Questing for great books to publish is frequently considered the “fun part” of publishing (for Christ’s sake, I get to go to Buenos Aires in a couple weeks to meet editors and authors and to immerse myself in the culture of Argentina . . . Does it get any better than that?) The part of this process that most fascinates me is actually the end result—finding a way to get people to pick up a particular book and spend their cash and time to read it.

Once a book is printed, it reaches a new and complex series of gatekeepers—namely the media, blogs, bookstores and readers themselves. Most publicists confer that no one thing can make an author a household name. Almost everyone agrees that a long interview on NPR’s Fresh Air can be a huge boost (one industry insider said that “Terry Gross blows [New York Times reviewer] Michiko Kakutani out of the water”), but that selling books requires a tricky mix of review attention, bookseller enthusiasm and word-of-mouth praise.

That uncertainty is what I find incredibly enjoyable about publishing. That and seeing someone reading a book you acquired/published on the subway . . .

Michael Orthofer—who both questioned the veracity of this statement and the idea that a review of a translation a week was a success—compiled some stats on the last three issues:

Of the 62 books reviewed in all a mere two — Ogawa Yoko’s The Diving Pool and Michael Krüger’s The Executor — were originally written in a foreign language (and they only received the ‘books-in-brief’-treatment).

I have a complicated relationship to all of this, in part because I feel that Kibbee’s kind of right—things are getting better for translations, he just chose an odd way of “proving” it—and that it’s not necessarily the mandate/responsibility of the NYTBR to cover a certain number of literary translations. True, it’s unfortunate that so few foreign voices make their way into the Book Review, and as a publisher who is always scrapping for any review coverage we can get, I wish the Times reviewed only literary translations, but I don’t feel like the Times is unilaterally hostile towards all books in translations.

(I’m sure many bloggers will disagree with me about this, but I really believe that what gets reviewed is tied up in a more complicated dynamic including who the publishers are, what’s hot, how publishers publicize, etc., etc. It’s just not as simple as translation vs. English . . . It may fall more into the realm of large publisher—with all the clout and organizational resources associated with that—versus small—and often disorganized or too busy to focus—and since large publishers have the means to really promote their books, and since so few are works in translation, these statistics turn out the way they do. I’d be interested in seeing what the percentages are for coverage of translated books from commercial presses versus translated books from indie presses. I suspect that a healthy percentage of books reviewed in the NYTBR from independent presses are literature in translation—but that the number of reviews of books from independent, or university, presses is rather modest. In shorthand, it’s complicated . . . )

One thing that came up at the Translation Conference panel was the relative lack of translator-reviewers. At a panel that took place a few weeks ago, representatives from the New York Times and The New Republic commented on how it can be difficult to find a good reviewer familiar enough with the context and tradition surrounding a particular work of international literature to be capable of writing a really thoughtful, interesting review.

That may be a bit of a cop-out, but it is absolutely true that there are far more American writers reviewing these days than there are translators . . . Not sure in the end if this would make a difference, but if there were a couple dozen very active translator-reviewers out there pitching books, capable of writing about a work from Brazil without relying solely on the English version and flap-copy bio of the author, maybe there would be an overall increase in the amount of general coverage of translations. . . .

“Independents,” for these purposes, are U.K. trade publishers that are not one of the Big Four (Hachette, Random House, HarperCollins and Penguin) or the Not-Quite-So-Big Three (Pan Macmillan, Bloomsbury and Simon & Schuster). As in the U.S., there are plenty of them around. The U.K.‘s Independent Publishers Guild has around 460 publishing members with a combined turnover of £500 million, and they are gradually increasing, not shrinking, in number as technology lowers the cost of entry. But the premium layer is visible and influential in a way that most U.S. independents are not. [. . .]

Their size, however, does give them one more pertinent common feature, neatly summed up by a publisher who has operated at both ends of the scale. “The bigger you are, the more you’re affected by the market,” says Tim Hely Hutchinson, CEO of U.K. market leader Hachette Livre U.K. “If you’re small, you make your own success.”

Most of this article focuses on the “entrepreneurial attitude” of indie presses—the way they find new ways to be successful, even in the face of market obstacles, such as display space:

These three-for-twos and other promotions paid for by the publishers—mostly the big ones—now fill the front of the major bookstores. This forces independents to rethink how they publish, maintains Anthony Cheetham, chairman of fast-growing Quercus Publishing. “The entire front of the store, the face-out space, is sold to the books that have the largest mass market potential,” he says. That effectively means sold to the six largest publishers, who have 90% of the weekly top 50 bestseller list. “The midlist—good books on history, science, philosophy, books by good, new literary writers—is squeezed out. The front of the store can’t respond to market forces if something from the back takes off, because the space is sold. So the big chains have their hands around the neck of the trade, and independents must look elsewhere.”

There’s also a bit of info about the Independent Alliance, which is an intriguing set-up:

The most visible face of independent publishing is the Independent Alliance (sometimes known as the Faber Alliance), created in 2005 in response to the darkening retail climate. [. . .] The idea was to present a united front to retailers by sharing Faber’s sales and administrative muscle with a number of smaller but distinctive publishers. They learn from each other’s best ideas and have begun hosting alliance conferences on topical issues, mostly recently on the digital world.

What comes through loud-and-clear (and is even referenced in the title of the article) is the devotion of indie publishers to every book they publish. There’s a stronger sense of ownership, of taking responsibility for making a book a success, which really appeals to me. There are some indie presses—like Arcadia—that probably should’ve been included in this article, but on the whole it’s a decent overview of the situation and how these presses function.

Although hopefully one day the statement from the opening paragraph—“But the premium layer [of independent presses] is visible and influential in a way that most U.S. independents are not”—will be grossly inaccurate.