Upcoming

Upcoming interviews:

Edward Champion of Reluctant Habits

Daniel E. Pritchard of The Wooden Spoon

Kassia Krozser of Booksquare

Levi Asher of LitKicks

John Reed of The Brooklyn Rail

Adam Bellow -- publisher, editor, author [part three]

Adam Bellow of the New Pamphleteer and HarperCollins:

Note: This is the second part of my interview with Bellow. An abridged version of it appeared at The Brooklyn Rail.

Note 2: This part of my interview with Bellow took place in the summer of 2007. Given that the interview includes a discussion of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, but took place long before the current war in Gaza, it should be read in that context.

CBT: I’d like to talk to you now about particular pamphlets that you’ve published. But first, if you don’t mind, would you please re-cap and tell us why pamphlets? Why this format?

AB: For me, the idea goes back to the late ‘90s, when I observed the beginnings of a contraction in the publishing industry that affected what are called mid-list books. That is to say, all the big companies yielding to the pressures of the market -- particularly the mass distribution model via Barnes and Noble – all began to prune back from their lists books they thought would not sell more than 10,000 copies. And this had an effect on what I do as a non-fiction editor specializing in books about politics and ideas. I found that I had less freedom to experiment and be playful and creative in my publishing choices. I had to lend my efforts more and more to brand-name authors with a track-record who the publisher felt we could turn into best sellers. And I thought this was an unhealthy development in the intellectual life of the country.

Particularly in a period when, as we then were and still are, ideological certainties were clearly breaking down in the aftermath of the Cold War, and now, even more, with the advent of the war on terror, we’re in a period of ideological flux. As we can see from American politics, many people, traditional Democrats, have moved right (or did, at least initially, after 9/11). And it’s not clear where we’re going to be after the next election. I think the most significant thing is the growth of a sector of voters who identify themselves as Independent. And it is this group of people I’m most interested in publishing by and for.

CBT: In terms of your list, I’d like to start with The Plucky Smart Kid with the Fatal Disease: A Life with Cystic Fibrosis by Dean Barnett. How did you come into contact with Mr. Barnett. Is Dean Barnett a blogger himself?

AB: Yes, Dean is a blogger who blogs on the website maintained by radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt. Hugh is a friend and someone who was very helpful to me in publishing one of my most successful pamphlets – a dictionary of military jargon called Embrace the Suck: A Guide to Milspeak. Hugh had us on his show– which is one of the most effective ways to promote pamphlet sales -- to promote that. And when we finished he said, “Oh, you must speak to my colleague Dean Barnett who has cystic fibrosis.”

Dean writes mostly about politics, but when he writes about his own life and his experience of having this dreadful disease, the traffic on the site spikes. Hugh had often read aloud on the radio Dean’s pieces about having cystic fibrosis. So there was a feeling this was something he could address, and so we worked with Dean not only to repackage his blog posts but tell his life story in about 6 or 7,000 words.

And it came out as really a lovely piece of writing, which is the main thing we try to maintain above all: a standard of intellectual and literary quality, and also to give an impression of variety and diversity, if not eclecticism.

CBT: Another pamphlet that impressed me was Raising Wild Boys into Men: A Dad’s Survival Guide by Tony Woodlief. It is about a much less poignant much more commonplace predicament than Dean Barnett’s. But it’s a difficult one: raising kids. Now, his concern is how we can raise boys to be boys on the one hand, and responsible adults on the other, without falling into the pitfalls of a certain form of political correctness that wants to smother aggressiveness in boys.

I’d like to ask two questions about this. The first is, again, how did you come in contact with Mr. Woodlief? And second, have you thought of publishing a follow-up title about raising girls – a sort of Raising Wild Girls into Women? But let’s just start with the question of how you came across Mr. Woodlief’s work.

AB: I was on a panel of the BEA in June, to talk about alternative publishing models, in front of a room full of literary agents. I was on a panel with a bunch of other publishers who do regular books, and so finally the question was asked of me, “Why should we pay any attention to you?” You know, I’m not paying advances, and I sell small quantities of pamphlets online for four dollars a piece. From an agent’s point of view, there’s not much to be gained from doing any business with me. And I said, “That’s fine, I actually don’t want to deal with agents. I have nothing to gain from dealing with you, either [laughs]. But what I can tell you is I’m doing work that’s important to you in the long run, because I’m finding writers in the blogosphere and the people I’m choosing to publish are people you should want to sign.”

The blogosphere is a pure literary democracy in the sense that stuff that is good, that has some quality, is going to attract readers. People emerge with a following, and they will be the voice of the future. And Tony Woodlief is one of these people. He’s a private individual: a guy who has an ordinary job, who happens to be a conservative Christian, and he and his wife are religious people who home-school their children. They have three little boys – now four – and Tony just writes about the day-to-day life in their household, which is very rich and emotionally and spiritually satisfying. He has a small following, very loyal. And he wrote to us, basically, and asked us if we were interested in publishing something by him. So he sent us a few ideas, and the one we liked the most was a straight-forward anecdotal account of what it’s like to be the father of three rambunctious little boys, all under ten, and trying to bring them into manhood.

And the theme was something that’s in the air. There’s a current bestseller called The Dangerous Book for Boys that did so well they brought out a companion book for girls. And so there seems to be a kind of general reaction against the politically correct swing of the pendulum toward trying to make boys play nice, and give up their rambunctious and violent ways, and be more like girls. This is how it was for many years in our culture, and school system. Boys were discouraged from being loud and noisy. And now the pendulum has swung back the other way.

In the case of Tony Woodlief, we had someone we felt had real appeal, and his pamphlet has been one of our most successful publications.

CBT: Now that brings us to the next title, Embrace the Suck: a Pocket Guide to Milspeak by Colonel Austin Bay. If my memory serves correctly, in the introduction Col. Bay mentions that you approached him. Could you tell us about that?

AB: This is something that all editors do – not just to read submissions from agents but to think up ideas on our own. Magazine editors do this, too. But as a magazine editor, you have the incentive of payment. We don’t really have that, but we do have the ability to come up with ideas and pitch them to people. And this is something that we could try, mainly because pamphlet publishing is its own paradigm. We’re not publishing little books or expanded magazine articles. We’re publishing a pamphlet, which is a different sort of animal. So the question is, what is that animal?

And one genre that I was interested in is the little pocket dictionary. I mean, people love books of lists. For example, we’re going to be coming up with a compendium of pop culture quotes selected by men. You know, it’s a similar idea behind Embrace the Suck. I read a lot of blogs, and I came across a neologism called milspeak. And I thought, that’s an interesting use of the word. I’ve never heard that before. What is milspeak? What are some of the terms? And I contacted Col. Bay, who has a blog, teaches at UT Austin, has a syndicated column, does NPR radio commentary, and blogs about Iraq and military matters. I asked him if he’d be interested in compiling this. And it happened quite quickly; Austin Bay, because of his connections in the military, was able to pull together several hundred military slang definitions very, very quickly, and so in a matter of weeks we had something ready to publish.

It had that kind of peculiar appeal, that whimsical charm that a pamphlet needs in order to succeed. Because the realities are that, unlike book publishing, you can’t push a pamphlet. We aren’t going to ship 50,000 copies to Barnes and Noble. We don’t have a marketing budget and publicity department. If a pamphlet is going to succeed, it has to have a sort of magnetic attraction. It has to pull rather than push. And so this pamphlet, Embrace the Suck, is our most successful title, because it exerted that kind of appeal. We’ve sold around 5,000 copies of it, including a number of large-quantity bulk sales, which suggests that people are distributing it as gifts, and using it as subscription premiums, and so forth. So on the whole it was a very positive experience for us.

CBT: One of the reactions I had to it as a reader, especially as someone who’s self-consciously against current U.S. policy in Iraq and to a certain extent in Afghanistan, was the degree to which the book lent itself to satire. When I read the acronyms, my instinctive reaction was to make up acronyms of my own.

As well, I remember during the first interview we had you talked about your desire, when you were at the Free Press and when you started the New Pamphleteer, to have the equivalent of pamphlet wars – debates between authors. Since you do have a reputation as a neoconservative, I was wondering how open you’d be to a blogger who came along and wanted to do what was in effect a satire of one of your first publications?

AB: I think that’s a clever idea. I guess my response would be, I don’t care what your politics are. What I care about is how good a writer are you, and is your theme or topic something for which there’s a market? I need to feel I can sell at least 300 copies. You’d think that wouldn’t be such a difficult target, but it turns out it can be. Unless people are charmed by what you’ve done, or you have an existing audience base, it can in fact be difficult to reach that target. So I don’t think you can go wrong with each of the categories that we know are reliable in publishing: sex and humour. And since I’m not publishing pornography, I have to fall back on comedy, humour and satire. And I’m happy to do that. I certainly don’t have any sectarian emphasis. Let me put it this way: if I had wanted to make this a right-wing pamphlet series, I easily could have done that.

CBT: I’d like to turn finally to the trio of books that you published about the war in the summer of 2006 between Hezbollah and Israel. The three titles are: Hassan Nasrallah: In His Own Words. Writings and Speeches by the Head of Hezbollah edited by Stephen Schwartz, Blog Digest #1: The Hezbollah War, edited by Michael Totten, and Everything Could Explode at any Moment: Dispatches from the Lebanese-Israeli Front by Michael Totten.

The pamphlets cover a very broad range of points of view, in particular the collection of blog posts in Blog Digest #1. And on a personal level, I found myself responding to this pamphlet in particular in a very empathetic way. It was a roller-coaster to read, because one moves from one point of view to a diametrically opposed one, and often both points of view, despite being conflicting, are, on a visceral level, very convincing.

But it was partly because of that emotional quality of the collection of posts that I wondered if you had considered also producing a pamphlet that gave a historical background or political analysis of the war. As well, I was struck in Totten’s pamphlet of his own posts that the war itself is skirted over. He has a lot of material about the days leading up to the war, and he has material about the end – or the days very close to the end – of it. But very little about the war itself. I suppose when putting the collection together, he felt the war was so fresh in everybody’s mind, that there would be no need to pay much attention to it. But even though I followed events fairly closely while the war took place and even though it didn’t occur so long ago, I found while reading this pamphlet I had to go to the Internet to remind myself of its particulars, and the timeline of events. Will you be publishing any more on this topic? Do you wish you had published more at the time?

AB: : I learned a valuable lesson there, which is don’t try to publish the news. Part of the point here is – because you raised a critical objection – there are three items in this release. One is a set of writings by Hassan Nasrallah. We thought it would be interesting. Nobody knew who he was at the time. It looked like he’d be the next leader of the world jihad. I thought it would be a public service to make some of his ideas accessible. And in fact, that material is fascinating. He’s a very intelligent guy. He’s crazy and dangerous, but he’s not irrational, and he has a definite point of view. So I think it’s valuable to read that material.

The editor of the other two volumes is Michael Totten, a very popular and well-liked blogger. He’s one of the first people who decided to make a living off blogging. This was essentially from contributions from his readers. He went to live in Lebanon, and blog from Beirut, and write about what’s going on there.

Michael Totten seemed to me to be a very interesting person, not just because he’s a good writer but also because he’s a citizen journalist who decided to go somewhere and write about something. It’s a form of economic democracy: if people like his stuff, they pay him. And if they don’t like it, of course they don’t.

He did a collection of his articles. But then we also decided to have him edit a compendium of responses to the war by Israeli and Lebanese bloggers. And I’m glad you read it. I agree with you, I think it’s very gripping material. What you’re doing is you’re alternating perspectives between Israeli and Lebanese bloggers. This is actually a very poignant document because as it happens, before the war broke out Lebanese and Israeli bloggers writing in English had begun to engage one another. And in a real sense, it was a dialogue. It was a real hope outside the normal chat for an interaction, and developing a relationship and friendship. And the war destroyed that, and it was a terrible tragedy.

In response to your comment that there’s a need for historical background – you know, that’s true. And if we had the time and the space, it would have been nice to publish an introduction. But we had too much material as it is.

You know, this is not a textbook or hardcover book. It’s a document – a kind of literary and historical document. Its value is literary in the sense that you can read it in terms of people just crying out in the wilderness of the blogosphere. There’s a lot of poignancy in that. It also has historical value. This is the first time a war was debated online between the two sides while it was going on. And I just felt as a publisher that it had documentary value.

Bio: Adam Bellow is, with his partner David Bernstein, publisher of the New Pamphleteer. He is also an editor with many years experience at houses such as MacMillan, Simon and Schuster, Random House and HarperCollins. Finally, he is an author in his own right, and has written several articles as well as the book In Praise of Nepotism. He is working on a new book.

STILLS WITHOUT SCRIPTS

Who is a Civilian?

A must-read article from the BBC on the current war in Gaza. Whatever one feels about the conflict, the issues raised in this article cut to the heart of what makes modern war both so appalling in its effects yet a form of political/military action that can define itself as "surgical".

As I argue below, the contemporary tendency in Western artistic discourse to attempt to wall off discussions about war as if these can be kept discrete from discussions about art and the "aesthetic" are only one example of how understanding of international law is stunted. This stunting means international law does not register as meaningful within Western popular culture; it does not receive the kind of attention it deserves -- that is true in the early days of this year, and it has been true in the years that have just passed.

Hopefully that will change. If it does not, future years will take the same shape as the ones we are currently living through.

Adam Bellow -- publisher, editor, author [part two]

Adam Bellow of the New Pamphleteer and HarperCollins:

Note: This is the second part of my interview with Bellow. An abridged version of it appeared at The Brooklyn Rail.

CBT: To what extent does mass media – and here I’m thinking of electronic media -- play a role in driving the choice that publishers make? After all, these days, mass media is so much about debate, and I think that’s one reason why the polemical books you mentioned earlier were a natural phenomenon, so to speak, since mass media can integrate its coverage with polemical books very easily, whereas novels aren’t given much attention. I live in South Korea, and when I watch North American TV, there’s zero coverage of Western literature, but there is a lot of coverage of Western movie-making. And while polemical books may not get much direct coverage as specific titles, the themes that particular polemical books deal with can be worked into the discourse of mass media very easily and in this sense get international coverage. How would you respond to that?

AB: I think it’s very true. In my career I’ve been very focused on publishing the kind of book that can be translated into sound bites. Obviously it’s difficult to do that with a novel, particularly a good one. Although there are very successful novels that succeed because of that. For example, a novel we published at Doubleday, The Devil Wears Prada, which succeeded because everyone knew it was a roman a clef about Anna Wintour, written by someone who had worked for her. And this set the New York media atwitter. And despite its lack of literary qualities, it became a best-seller because it was possible for the media to talk about it in their own terms in a way that was interesting to a mass audience. You can’t really do that with a Franzen novel. So there are obvious limitations there. Especially with non-fiction, we are particularly dependent on the interest of the media. We work very hard to package our books in such a way – I would even say we spoon feed handles and talking points to people in the media.

One thing we know about the media – I’m talking about television and radio primarily – is that it is a vast sort of bottomless maw that needs to be fed on a daily basis. It’s literally starving for content. And that’s a good thing, because books, for a number of reasons, continue to be the source and the driver of so much of what is talked about in popular media.

The big driver, the big engine, outside of politics, is the movie and entertainment industry. That’s an endless source of fascination, and the media feed off the film industry and the social life of Hollywood. But books retain a special authority, simply by virtue of their having been published between hard covers. And this is actually a valuable service that publishers perform.

You know, we are an industry that has the privileged position of feeding material into the culture that people tend to trust because it comes from us. Books themselves inherently retain a certain numinousness, a certain authority, even if they’re not by a Harvard professor or New York Times op-ed columnist. The fact that a book has been printed and has a certain permanence and is not fleeting like a movie or TV show, gives it a certain authority.

And that’s why books continue to drive a great deal of what is talked about in other media. So we’re conscious of this role in the system, sort of this feeder of the media. And we try to play along with them and give them what they need in a form they can readily absorb and understand. Because we know they’re not going to actually read these books. They’re going to read the press release, the press kit, Q & A, and so forth. And we just try to prepare them to talk intelligently about things –

CBT: So it’s all true! It’s all true, the rumours about interviewers who don’t read –

AB: [laughing] What’s the point of publishing a book that people don’t understand and can’t grasp? This is not news to anybody. We have a very short time to establish a book in the marketplace. And if it takes too long to explain what a book is about, the media, which is incredibly impatient, simply ignores it or takes note of it and moves on very quickly. And this raises a question that you raised earlier, which is can pamphlets compete in this kind of culture? But before I answer that, I’d like to say to say something about why I’m doing this, and how I came to conceive of this idea and what I’m hoping to accomplish. Then we can talk about the obstacles that I face, because there are definitely obstacles.

This idea goes back to the years in the ‘90s when I was editorial director of The Free Press at Simon and Schuster. I took over The Free Press at a time that was really the height of the domestic culture war. And I had been very involved as an editor in publishing books by what was then the conservative intellectual opposition movement. It was a very exciting time because we were battering down the ramparts of the liberal-dominated opinion media. And it was a tremendous victory if we got a book reviewed in the New York Times. Typically they didn’t feel they had to do it. But we had published a number of best-sellers. So at the time I took over The Free Press it had acquired a reputation as a right-wing house. But this was not really fair to the other editors.

The Free Press had a long and venerable history as a social science publisher, and it put out around 120 books a year. There were seven or eight editors, publishing all these serious books. And yet it was only the conservative books that got attention, so the general perception of the Free Press was that we had gone right-wing. And as the editorial director, I felt it was my job, my responsibility, to reposition the press so it would not be misperceived. But this was a difficult thing to do. So I began to think about how one would go about doing this. And I had the idea, because I’m something of an amateur historian of publishing, and I’ve always been fascinated by the role of pamphlets in fostering political debate and also social movements of various kinds. And I thought, well, maybe I could publish a pamphlet series, and what we would do is invite people from the left as well as the right to contribute, and we’d start our own little in-house pamphlet war.

I didn’t think this would be a money-maker. But it would serve to position the Free Press as a house that was not so much partisan or right-wing as a house that was serious about ideas.

So I took this idea to Simon and Schuster, and I reminded them that back in the 1920s and ‘30s, most publishing companies had magazines that they also published. You know, Scribner had Scribner’s magazine and there were Harper’s, Collier’s, the Atlantic, and they served a number of purposes.

First of all, they were going concerns in their own right. But they also served to show-case house authors and to attract new authors. It was a smart thing to do. And I thought of the Free Press pamphlet series as the equivalent of a magazine. Well, needless to say, the management at Simon and Schuster didn’t really see the point in doing this, and I gave up.

CBT: Did they say why during those meetings?

AB: Well, they just -- I think they were correct insofar as it would have been a nice thing to do if you could have done it successfully on a mass market level. But it would have been very difficult to make it financially viable because with something you’d be publishing at a low price point – you know, 4 or 5 dollars – to get that kind of thing into mass distribution you have to meet all kinds of market tests that one usually applies to a mass market book. You have to have a famous author, to whom you have to pay a lot of money, and you have to figure out how to earn back that money. And the only way to earn back that money is to have a thesis, or an argument, that’s truly timely and controversial and is likely to attract media attention. And that’s hard to guarantee. And to make back the kind of investment – let’s say we could’ve gotten Tom Wolfe to write a pamphlet, we would have had to pay him $50,000 and we would have had to sell at four dollars a unit, five dollars a unit, something like 30 – 40,000 copies. And without the ability to count on the review media, it’s a tough thing to do. Really, it would have been like launching a magazine, and it would have cost a lot of money. So I didn’t really disagree with them, I just tucked the idea away in the back of my mind.

But as I said earlier, I continued to feel there was somehow a kind of pamphleteering spirit trying to be reborn. There was a pamphleteering culture trying to emerge, and it was really being stifled by the business model of the big publishers. I mean, only a few very established voices like Schlesinger’s were able to get through, and to be published in that medium.

So I basically tabled the idea. I just put it aside, and went back to my conventional job as an editor. Soon after that I left the Free Press. And I wrote a book myself, In Praise of Nepotism, which was published by Doubleday, and along the way I accepted a position at Doubleday as an editor-at-large, which is my current role. And that is a position that was designed to allow me to do my own writing or other projects, and contribute a limited number of books to the Doubleday list.

However, a big change that occurred in the culture after 9/11, as you know, is that the blogosphere exploded. It really came into its own as a medium for independent journalists and writers, and it began to challenge the existing media. And I became, like many other people, an addictive reader of blogs during the Afghan War and the Iraq War. And it suddenly occurred to me that this was the solution to my pamphlet problem.

I’d had to give up on the idea of publishing pamphlets because I couldn’t make it work in the conventional structure of distribution and promotion. But with the internet I realized not only did you have an immense pool of talent to fish from but you also had a low-cost delivery system. As long as you could print small quantities of a pamphlet and sell it cheaply through your website, you didn’t have to spend a lot of money on printing, shipping and warehousing. You didn’t have to have a big marketing budget. All you had to have were certain conditions to be met in terms of an author with a certain visibility within a very well-defined niche market, and you could break even in effect and even make a little profit at low levels. And really what I’m describing is a re-invention of mid-list intellectual publishing.

The other thing that occurred in the ‘90s in the publishing business was something referred to euphemistically as the Great Mid-list Contraction. This occurred when a number of big companies decided – all at the same time – to go out of the business of publishing first novels by literary authors. You know, small novels that they didn’t think really had the potential to be commercial. So Harper-Collins, for example, famously cancelled several hundred contracts in one stroke – just got rid of them. And they also got rid of Basic Books, which was a venerable non-fiction publishing imprint – the analog of the Free Press –along with Pantheon which was part of Random House -- and Addison-Wesley, and a few other formerly independent publishers that had become part of various publishing houses. These places were all sold off or shut down or re-invented.

Pantheon today is a little boutique publisher that doesn’t really have much reason to exist, and is part of the main Random House list. But it has no connection with its past. It was founded by a couple of German-Jewish refugees, Kurt and Helen Wolff, and they brought to it a European kind of publishing sensibility and they published very serious books. And their successor Andre Schiffrin made what to all appearances was a successful, lively, vibrant publishing company with a sort of left-leaning agenda. And they published a lot of bestsellers. But even so, it just didn’t make enough money, and from the point of view of upper management, quite simply it was a better use of floor space to publish cook-books or Dilbert, or what have you, because that stuff makes money. There might be one or two books published by Pantheon – the Studs Terkel books, for example, that were worth publishing. But the rest they thought were inconsequential. And they just changed it.

Now this decision on the part of the big publishing companies was really driven by changes in the marketplace for books; the emergence of Barnes and Noble as a national chain had all kinds of ripple effects backward up the chain of the publishing process. Because when you have a big chain store, their interest was in moving large numbers of books and so they will order large quantities of books they think will sell.

But as publishers start to think about, well, how do I supply this marketplace, what do I have to do? The answer is if you want to have a book that will sell in very large numbers, you have to have an author who can get on the mass media outlets like Good Morning America, the Today Show, and so forth. And those people are celebrity authors, and celebrity authors have to be paid million dollar advances. And if you’re spending all your money on a couple of seven-figure books, you’re not going to have the room in your budget, or even the desire, to do a couple of first novels that some editor happens to be crazy about. That’s just not going to happen.

So what I’m describing is a kind of ossification that occurs in the editorial and publishing process that’s driven by what’s happening on the retail floor. These are the changes that we in the creative end of the publishing business have had to contend with. And it’s affected me as well as a non-fiction editor because when I worked at the Free Press in the old days we’d sit around the boardroom and we’d say, well, here’s an odd little book by a maverick sociologist who’s got an interesting idea, and heaven knows if anyone’s going to find it interesting, but what the heck, it’s only going to cost us $10,000. We’ll pay very little advance – the author didn’t have an agent. Let’s just publish it, throw it at the wall and see what happens. And you know -- sometimes those books disappeared without a trace, and sometimes they’d catch on. Because you never knew when something would catch on.

We can’t do that any more. In my end of the business, we can’t do it when we sit down in a meeting with the sales and marketing people. We have to be able to say, this person is the best-selling author of X, and this book is going to outperform that one for the following reasons. And they take that kind of analysis seriously. What they don’t want is to be told that this book is terrific, but we can give you no help in terms of marketing and positioning the author. And so these sorts of books are subtly (or not so subtly) discouraged. And editors who obviously want to succeed like everyone else, they just don’t propose those books anymore.

So what I’m trying to do in part with my pamphlet series is to – I would say from an industry perspective, I’m trying to re-create the mid-list publishing model lower down the food chain. Just because those books are no longer going to be published by Random House and Penguin and Harper-Collins, well, it doesn’t mean that there’s no longer any demand for them. And there’s plenty of supply. The question is how to bridge that gap – how to connect the supply with the demand in a format – through a publishing vehicle – that makes sense in the New Economy. And my solution is, let’s take the guts of this 300 page non-fiction book, shrink it down in effect to under a hundred pages and give people something for low cost that we as editors think is worth their time. And remember the real equity that I and my partner David Bernstein bring to this enterprise is to combine 25, 35 years of combined experience as professional editors.

Now to turn to the question of the material we’re publishing: we are for the most part deriving it form the internet and the blog world. But it is important to be clear that we are not simply re-packaging blog content because that would not be of any interest to anybody. What we are doing is identifying talent in the blog world. And we’re offering to work with people and develop their ideas and their skills to the point that there’s something people might actually want to pay for.

Bio: Adam Bellow is, with his partner David Bernstein, publisher of the New Pamphleteer. He is also an editor with many years experience at houses such as MacMillan, Simon and Schuster, Random House and HarperCollins. Finally, he is an author in his own right, and has written several articles as well as the book In Praise of Nepotism. He is working on a new book.

Art and the leash

I spend a lot of time -- perhaps an inordinate, shameful amount of time -- surfing the lit-blogosphere. This is partly the result of my living overseas and needing some way to keep in touch. It's also a reflection of a belief the lit-blogosphere matters, and that the Internet, despite its many short-comings, represents one of the best paths for literature to save itself.

One thing that has recently struck me, however, is the near-total silence surrounding the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I'm speaking of course of silence in the lit-blogosphere; there's no shortage of coverage -- and opinion-expressing -- elsewhere. And maybe this is partly the result of disaster-fatigue: a seemingly interminable state of strife between the Palestinians and the Israelis, the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, the war two-and-a-half years ago between Israel and Hezbollah (in fact, a war whose territory covered most of southern Lebanon), and half-acknowledged "low-intensity" conflicts in Darfur, areas of the Congo, the southern Philippines and southern Thailand are now coated by the thick patina of domestic, economic disaster. Numbness is a natural response to this much in the way of interesting times.

But it's not simply numbness, I think, that inspires the litblogosphere's silence on politics; it's also a belief specific to the West that politics and art cannot, by their very natures, mix, and that to attempt to do so is to mark one as a tiresome ideologue at best, an artistic all-thumbs at worst. Furthermore, the argument of arguments -- the ur-argument of the institutions of the literary establishment -- is such engagement by artists is futile. This is a truth apparently discovered after the end of the Romantic Movement and during the bloody middle of World War One. Poetry can't change the world because it can't change human nature.

But what happens in a world without poetry? That is, what happens to a world that lacks politically aware poetry when the age itself is political? What happens to art in times when history, to use a paraphrase employed by Jan Kott, is "let off the leash"?

Recently Seen

Zbigniew Brzezinski interviewed by Joe Scarborough on the latest of the Israeli-Palestinian wars.

[via Nattering Classes]

Adam Bellow -- publisher, editor, author [part one]

Adam Bellow of the New Pamphleteer and HarperCollins:

Note: This is the first part of a longer interview, which I shall post in weeks to come. An abridged version of it appeared at The Brooklyn Rail.

CBT: The philosophy behind the New Pamphleteer is that, where published text is concerned, shorter is better. Yet the current trend of the publishing industry seems to be an almost blind faith in the artistic and/or intellectual superiority of the Big (that is, Long) Book. Furthermore, this inclination in favour of the Big seems to be reinforced by the book reviewing apparatus, which also gives "major" works a conspicuous amount of attention.

Can pamphlet-length books really count of being judged on their content alone? Or has the fetishization of the Big Book become so entrenched that what one is fighting is not so much just a struggle for fair attention, but an ingrained prejudice?

AB: think we should take up first your premise of whether the book industry is biased toward the bigger or longer book. From a certain point of view of course it is, and for structural reasons that have to do with the emergence of large-scale corporate publishers. I’ve been twenty years a book editor at MacMillan, Simon and Schuster and Random House, and what I’ve seen arise is a true mass market for hard-cover non-fiction books. Naturally publishers and book-sellers alike make more money on a book they can charge 30 dollars for. But buyers are somewhat price conscious, and intellectual non-fiction cannot normally be published much above 26 – 27 dollars.

On the other hand, if you have a big fat biography of Teddy Roosevelt or John Adams, you find this price sensitivity is not such a great issue. So what I see is a continuing preference for books that can be published at a high price because the margins are better and the big publishers have, as you know, enormous bureaucracies and hierarchies filled with marketing, sales, publicity, financial, and legal departments. And they have to be paid for by profits from books, and book publishing is not famously a high margin business, which is why we don’t spend a lot of money on marketing and advertising.

At the same time, I would point out something I really began to notice in the early ‘90s, not long after I came into publishing, and that is what I would describe as the attempt – a struggle if you will – in which the pamphlet is struggling to return or re-emerge. I began to notice in the early’90s, really at the peak of the domestic culture war, books started to appear like Arthur Schlesinger’s Disuniting of America or Philip Howard’s Death of Common Sense. They were books about 160 – 180 pages, priced about 19, 20, 21 dollars, and they all became enormous best sellers.

Now it took me a while to realize that these books were essentially pamphlets. The reason you don’t recognize them as such is that they’re published in hardcover and priced pretty high as opposed to being published as trade paperbacks. The reason they’re not published as paperbacks is twofold. First, paperbacks have to be priced considerably lower, and so the margins are even smaller for the publisher. Also because paperback books don’t get reviewed. So if you have a polemical argument that you think is timely, as a publisher you really want it in hardcover.

Take Robert Kagan’s book about Europe and America. It grew out of an article, as many of these pamphlet-style books had done, and was published in hardcover almost instantly by Knopf and became a very big success. And here’s what I would describe as the attempt by large-scale corporate publishers to speed up their response time – to be more reactive. Because typically it takes, as you know, a couple of years for a book to be written and then another year for it to work its way through the production and marketing process.

So as the tempo of events has picked up, particularly, I would say, after the end of the Cold War in ‘89, publishers are really trying to act a little more like magazine editors. But they still have the constraints imposed by their lumbering bureaucracies and publishing processes, and so my conclusion – sorry about the length of my answer, but my conclusion is, there will always be a place in the market for the big book. This is what I term the “fat book” theory. There are some books that need to be published – that readers in fact want at length. As I sometimes say, there will always be readers who want to know how many pairs of spectacles Teddy Roosevelt had in his vest pocket when he charged up San Juan Hill. (The answer is twelve.) And that is the kind of interesting fact that, you know, you wouldn’t get that in a 150 page life of Teddy Roosevelt.

So there are always going to be people who want that. But particularly when it comes to current affairs and political controversy, people want faster interventions from the intellectual class, if you will. They want more of what I would describe as a French publishing culture, in which you have high-level intellectuals like Bernard Henri-Levy firing off a book on his summer vacation, and it’s in print a couple of months later. This is what’s necessary, because to continue my broader cultural analysis, after the end of the Cold War, clearly the West entered an ideological crisis. And then we have the outbreak of the age of terror. And so the world is changing rapidly, and the pace of change has accelerated, and people have a need for illumination and knowledge of the dark world outside their little Hobbit villages. And so they naturally turn to the intellectual and journalistic class. But they’re also demanding more substance in a shorter format, delivered faster, and book publishers are struggling to deliver this, but the industry is not suited to do it.

CBT: One of the great paradoxes of contemporary literature is that while the reading public generally has less time for reading, books that are critically lauded as major have become longer. It seems (again speaking generally) that they contain a lot of "stuff writing" -- i.e., passages that in earlier decades serious writers would have been inclined to cut. And the word count of contemporary major novels is sometimes noticeably very high.

Any comments? Has the contemporary novel become too long and self-indulgent? Or is length an irrelevant concern to the writer of vision?

AB: I like the phrase "stuff writing." It captures well the digressive tendencies bordering on self-indulgence of certain major writers -- Roth, DeLillo, Wallace, and Tom Wolfe to name a few whose books (and editors) have been criticized along these lines. However, in my view the readers of such books don't mind and may in fact prefer their novels large and all-embracing. People who do read seriously like to be fully absorbed by a book. The novel was originally meant to be a reflection of human society and a broad repository of knowledge -- look at Middlemarch, or Moby Dick, or Gravity's Rainbow. I think the taste for such books, as well as for lengthy historical novels, may be part of a healthy reaction against the constrained, minimalist, and overly 'personal' fiction of recent decades.

CBT: It's not uncommon for contemporary successful novelists to have little experience of regular, non-literary work. Is this a problem for the culture?

American writers used to come from all strata of society, from the patriciate to the working class. Now writing has become a white collar occupation, and most writers come from the affluent middle. Moreover, just as regional cultures have been dissolved in the acid of mass culture, today's writers are no longer autodidacts but products of the modern university system. After graduating from Ivy League colleges where they receive virtually the same education and acquire the same social views, they pass through professional degree-granting programs and are fed into a network of well-funded academic and nonprofit institutions that serve to further insulate them from the realities of American life. That I think explains the insular, self-referential feel of so much modern fiction, and why such writers must do "research" when they turn to topics other than themselves. On top of all this there is a natural tendency for writers to marry one another (like Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman) which tends in turn toward caste formation and dynasticism, as it has most visibly in Hollywood. Under the circumstances a general economic collapse might be the best thing that could possibly happen to American literature.

CBT: In your opinion, will the current economic crisis have a more deleterious effect on books sales than past recessions? If so, is there anything publishers can do to weather the storm?

AB: This is a grim topic for someone like me who works in the New York publishing industry. Publishers are indeed being hit hard by the collapse of consumer spending and a general contraction has begun with significant layoffs and restructuring at a number of companies. But as in other sectors, this has been coming for a long time and there is no reason publishers should be insulated from broader economic forces. Plus to a large extent they brought it on themselves, insofar as books have been priced very high and are essentially now luxury goods. This is a natural result of rising costs, combined with conglomeration and the transformation of publishing into a mass market phenomenon--all well-documented trends. Some recent commentators have predicted that books will henceforth be read by an elite coterie of esthetes and that publishing itself should go back to its pre-corporate days as a vocation for the rich. I doubt that will happen but there could be a major wave of technology-driven differentiation wherein big houses will concentrate on the mass market, competing fiercely for sure things -- i.e. bestselling authors and writers with media platforms -- while smaller houses pick up the slack, publishing the literary novels and mid-list nonfiction that are no longer cost-effective from the corporate point of view. The New Pamphleteer is part of this trend toward new-media based micropublishing, which is already well underway.

Bio: Adam Bellow is, with his partner David Bernstein, publisher of the New Pamphleteer. He is also an editor with many years experience at houses such as MacMillan, Simon and Schuster, Random House and HarperCollins. Finally, he is an author in his own right, and has written several articles as well as the book In Praise of Nepotism. He is working on a new book.

STILLS WITHOUT SCRIPTS

Adam Bellow - full interview upcoming

When Blogger stops causing me grief, I shall post the first part of my extended interview with Adam Bellow.

Catheryn Kilgarriff -- publisher (Marion Boyars)

Catheryn Kilgarriff of Marion Boyars Publishers:


1. Literature is in trouble -- that is, more trouble than usual. Why do you think this is? The increasing prevalence of TV? The distractions of increasingly narcotic subcultures such as video games? Sept. 11? Or is talk of the "death of literature" simple exaggeration?

Literature is not in trouble. Film adaptations help literature, blogs spread the word of good books (both private and ones like The Guardian Unlimited,) video clips on YOU TUBE are used to promote novels, writers are seen as cool people.

The one area that is intensely dangerous is the discounting of books in the UK by the chains – the 3/2. There are only so many books a person wishes to read, so if they have bought 3, they will not buy again for another month. But I am hoping that very soon, internet buying direct from publishers web sites will replace the power of amazon, and the availability of books in shops. Ie – if you read good publishers web sites, and buy directly from them, you should never have to hunt for a book in a large chain fruitlessly again. But the chains run the danger of only being visited by people looking for a bargain, and I am afraid the blame for this lies at their doors.


2. And what is literature, anyway? Should the novel be considered the prime example of it?

Literature is anything which challenges the status quo – so Riverbend’s blogs, Baghdad Burning, published by us in two volumes, are an excellent example of good literature.


3. Prizes and awards are playing an increasing role in determining an author's career-trajectory. In short, winning a major literary prize can win a writer a large audience overnight (not to mention, considerable fame and financial remuneration). But, as British critic Jason Cowley has observed, what is lost is the the ability for readers to think in a critically complex fashion.

Are literary prizes dangerous in this regard? Do they convey to the public the message that "this book is worth reading and all these others aren't"?

I think book buyers are capable of making choices – they do not buy every prize winner. But certainly, books they would not have noticed come to their attention, and this is a good thing. Prizes are important.


4. Literary publishing has always been a marriage of art and commerce. But in recent years, the Cult of the Deal has become more influential, with agents demanding larger advances and marketing people paying especially close attention to sales figures. Is the "art" side of the business being pushed out?

The art side of the business has to co exist with the business side. Neither should be ignored, and the books published to make money will be different from the ones published because an editor or publisher loved them. It is just that some books loved by an editor will not see light of day since sales just cannot be envisaged, and the publisher does not wish to lose money and disappoint the author.

Some advances are silly – they are so large. But this just does not apply to the literary independent.


5. Many major publishers now refuse to accept "unsolicited" work; that is, they will not even consider work unless it is agented. Is this a sound policy from point of view of finding the best new literary voices? Isn't there a chance good writing will be squeezed out?

We have only taken one novel from the slush pile – a very good Irish writer living in Canada called Gerard Beirne. His novel, THE ESKIMO IN THE NET, sold a respectable 2000 copies. If it had got onto a good prize long list, it would have done better. So, we look at our slush pile properly, but it rarely produces the goods.


6. Alternatively, for small presses that do accept unsolicited work, is the problem that the majors are squeezing the small houses at the distribution/retail marketing end? In other words, even when good writers get published by small houses, do they have a fair chance of winning an audience? Or are the major houses introducing an overly corporate, overly aggressive mentality to the book trade?

There is no reason for a good small house to be squeezed out by the large publishers. With head offices at the chains taking the buying decisions, the role of the rep in the large houses has diminished. Penguin now has 10 reps, HarperCollins UK, about 12. We have 6 plus myself, which makes 7. There is hardly any difference between how our books are presented to the trade and how the lead titles from the main houses are. The only difference is that we are more often breaking new authors, since we cannot afford large advances. Ie, when we have made the name of a new author, we often lose them to a large house. BUT – the authors often come back to us, since we work harder for our authors (we have fewer front list books a year) and we achieve better sales for them, better publicity, and we tour them at the major literary festivals. We also enter them for prizes – and, please note, each house is limited to 2 or 3 entries per prize (Booker, Orange). So, any author at a large house is LESS likely to be entered than if they are published by a small house.

In the area of rights, big and small houses work closely together. The big houses acknowledge our skill at finding new talent and they often want to buy the mass market paperback rights from us. This whole system benefits everyone.


7. Returning to the question of agents -- are they too powerful? If so, in what ways? Or are they a largely beneficial and necessary element of contemporary publishing?

I’d love to see an agent negotiate with Waterstone’s or Borders over discounts and 3/2 promotions. That’s the area agents have no idea of. They choose to ignore it, try to raise advances and change terms, and all that happens is that the author gets let down by too high expectations coming from their agent.


8. Does Britain have too many publishers? Or too few?

Probably too many. New houses start all the time. I wish them well, but it’s a tough business.


9. In your opinion, how will new technologies such as the e-book or audio books affect the "form" of the book?

Not as much as people think. The 3D book is transportable, user friendly and lasts over time.


10. Putting aside the hype, does the Internet provide a real opportunity to publishers? If so, how?

As said before, it’s a wonderful promotional device and hopefully soon a lot of book sales will be direct from publisher’s web sites.


11. And what role can traditional, venerable institutions such as libraries and English Departments play in reversing the decline in sales of literary fiction?

English teachers will always be hugely influential on young minds. Young people hardly use public libraries as they have personal computers. So entertainment is already at the flick of a button. But parents can be influential. I bring back 4 books a month from my local library for my two teenage daughters who are as lazy as they come. But, shock horror, they run to the pile and read these books very fast. One day they will manage to walk two blocks to the library themselves…probably when they are at university and I am not there.


12. What projects are you working on now that you are excited about?

Chocolate and Zucchini by Clotilde Dusoulier May 2007

Builds on the success of recent books from blogs, including Julia and Julie by Julie Powell which won the Lulu blog award in 2006, and of course, Baghdad Burning

Probably the first cook book with international appeal for the new generation which uses the net as their networking base. High profile launch at the Institut Français with food.

“Not some wronger-than-wrong fusion cooking site, but a blog (in English) built around the twin culinary passions of its 27 year old Parisian writer, Clotilde Dusoulier: fresh, healthy eating and, as well, the magical dark stuff. It is real escapist, drool-on-your-keyboard stuff as Dusoulier drifts around Paris on a waft of sugar-scented air, stumbling across delicious delicacies.’ The Guardian

‘You can just see Audrey Tatou playing her in the movie as she traipses all over Paris, finding the bakery supply store that her mother shopped at, eating out, cooking and writing down recipes and shopping tips along with insights into French life.” Los Angeles Times

Enlightenment by Maureen Freely. March 2007

An investigative journalist returns to Istanbul, the scene of her early love affair with Sinan. She has to overcome her qualms when she is asked by his ‘honeypot’ wife to help her regain her son, taken away by the American authorities when Sinan is arrested on entry into the States.
A thriller involving a retired intelligence operative, a mysterious ‘trunk’ murder, and a group of young people involved in subterfuge, but now tackling a real crisis, Maureen Freely’s novel shows how in Turkey nobody is who they are and everyone is suspect.
Maureen Freely writes widely for several newspapers, and is a respected authority on the current situation in Turkey. She is a controversial writer who is not afraid to criticise the Turkey she loves.

Touba and the Meaning of Light by Shahrnush Parsipur
An epic and challenging novel about one woman’s lifetime covering eight decades of Iranian history
Winner of a PEN WRITERS IN TRANSLATION AWARD 2007.
Banned books are a major draw, and one of the broadsheets is running a promotion so reviews guaranteed. Tour highlighting other banned and prosecuted authors on our list, Elif Shafak, Hong Ying and Hubert Selby Jr.
‘Parsipur…endured jail and torture to preserve her sense of dignity and integrity, and as a writer and innovator… Her protagonists are women whose rebellions are not merely political but existential.’ Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran
‘Initially published in Iran in 1989, this ground-breaking novel – which juxtaposes reality and mysticism, becoming especially fantastical toward the book’s conclusion – was quickly banned by the Islamic Republic.’ Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)A new novel by an author who left us and has come back (still confidential but highly commercial)


Statement: Firstly, Marion Boyars was my mother who died in 1999 so she will not be answering any questions. The eminent back list, with the novels of Hubert Selby Jr, the UK rights for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, the works on John Cage, Heinrich Boll and Georges Bataille, these are all her work. Our recent publication of novels by Hong Ying, Elif Shafak, and the Iraqi blogs by Riverbend, Baghdad Burning – all of which have attained world wide fame, are my work. So, it’s a kind of combination of both of us.

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