Fungible Convictions

Tonight Brookline Booksmith held a talk/reading in honor of small Boston publishers. But not really. Speakers included representatives of Ploughshares, Post Road, Redivider, Salamander, and Quick Fiction, but no one from a press, per se.

As such, the audience was drawn from the unpublished masses—I know that sounds perjorative, but everyone there really did seem to want to know the answers to the most basic lit mag questions: what info should my cover letter include, what about simultaneous submissions, etc.

It also served as an impromptu visual reunion for my Emerson College classmates—none of us had the chance to talk, as Brookline Booksmith is an incredibly cramped, face-forward-or-die kind of venue, nothing like the friendly environment of the Enormous Room during the most recent Four Stories reading.

To have a “small press night” and not have any actual presses says a lot about the Boston literary scene. The scene is very writer-centric, first of all. The ratio of magazines submitted to to magazines subscribed to is probably 10-to-1. And second of all, writers here don’t think in terms of books. Boston writers want to publish poems, stories, and collections. Are we lazy? Are our sights set too low? Whatever it is, it means writers here a) ignore small book publishers, even though it’s easier to turn a small profit in your spare time with a small book press than a small literary magazine and b) forget their role as reader and financial supporter of other writers.

Tomorrow night I’m heading to the Somerville BBQ joint Red Bones (which will be hell during the fast) with Bill to celebrate the paperback release of The Legends of Winter Hill. I don’t know if I’ll know anyone but Bill there, but I’m sure I’ll enjoy the more down-to-earth audience. If you’re a local reader of Fungible Convictions, be sure to make your way to Red Bones at 7:00pm.

When folks defend the Google Print model, often they say helping people find no-longer-promoted books is win-win-win: publishers sell books they thought were dormant; authors get a few more bucks in royalties; and readers get a book that was otherwise hidden. All true, if it weren’t for the problem of inventories. . . .

These older books—where are they supposed to sit?

So long as print copies, as opposed to electronic copies, are the norm, publishers will need warehouse space, and what publisher is going to hold onto tiny stocks of a few books, taking up space and money, just in case a Google Print user stumbles across it? That user may even buy the book used, cutting the publisher and author out of the loop. (Although most 5000-print-run authors I know would much rather someone read their book than themselves receive the $2 in royalties.) A colleague of mine once said, when I asked her why our textbook company wasn’t also in the used book business, “We probably should be. But to do that, we’d have double the books to manage—and where are they going to go? Where are we going to get the million dollars to build the extention to our warehouse?” It’s something that may change, but it won’t soon.

And then another problem. Once a publisher stops actively promoting a title, it’s only a few years before the rights revert to the author. If a book published in 2000 didn’t find an audience in its first (promoted) years, the right to publish that book will likely go back to the author around 2006, and then the author has no way to print new copies or manage stock. Once a publisher sells out of its stock of a rights-reverted book, there are zero new copies left anywhere.

So while, yes, Google Print will help people find hidden books and will probably be a net positive for authors, this potential sea change will have losers, copyright debates aside. And those would-be losers are going to be fiercely defensive of their interests, as the AAP is showing with its lawsuit against Google.

by Andrew Whitacre

Imagine, say, the R&D folks at an automaker tell their boss, “Market research shows our potential customers hate orange. We are therefore launching a new line of orange cars, and only orange cars, until our customers come around.” Insanity, yes? But this is an insanity shared by literary magazines: each lit mag is published precisely because no one wants to read it.

Sure, there’s also the ego of the founding editor, a moral sincerity, communal desperation, or sustained glee. But a motive all lit mags have in common is a belief that certain stories—and not others—should be pushed in front of the eyes of otherwise indifferent readers. It’s an industry dedicated to breaking entrepreneurship’s first rule: you can’t create your market. The market’s there, lit mag folks insist, people just don’t know it yet!

Year after year, though, magazines fail because they couldn’t convince people to care. Continue reading