On Sunday, the North Carolina based daily News & Observer took a look at the current state of small presses, specifically Carolina Wren Press.
The feature comes amidst almost daily news of big publishing houses in trouble (or trouble of a sort), and the big outlets like Borders struggling to keep afloat. It’s a logical leap to think small publishers and their outlets are equally troubled, but they are of course much harder to document, which makes this News & Observer story all the more interesting.
It begins with some grim statistics which may very well be accurate, but without attribution or documentation it’s hard to know what to think of them. And then there’s paragraphs like this:
“A decade ago a small press could guarantee sales of 2,000 books to libraries. Now it’s unusual for a small publisher to crack 100. Walk into any library these days and what do you see? Computers. Each computer purchased probably replaces at least 100 books.”
Really? Since we’re dealing in probables, why not just say each computer replaces a million books and kills a puppy? Could be!
Anyways, it was nonetheless true before the current meltdown that many small presses were hanging on by a thread, and as 2008 wound down I’m sure many found themselves in dire straits.
Since the Kindle still has very little by way of contemporary poetry and big publishers are hell-bent on throwing all their money at Laura Bush and Sarah Silverman, small presses are increasingly the only place contemporary poetry lives in print.
There is some strange comfort, though, to read a quote like this from literary agent Amanda Urban in the New York Times:
“Books can only support a certain retail price,” she said. “It’s not like you have books that can be Manolo Blahniks and books that can be Cole Haan. Books are books. A book by James Patterson costs the same as a book by some poet.”
Welcome to our world, James Patterson!
Thanks for this post.
Posted By: Francisco Aragón on January 6, 2009 at 10:56 pmReport this comment
I happily admit that I laughed aloud over my breakfast oatmeal at the bit about computer killing puppies (”Could be!”), having demonstrably very little patience myself for the whole hand-wavy OMG-computers-are-ruining-EVERYTHING rhetoric. But, I also take the (still rather silly) writer’s point—s/he merely means, in terms of budget. That one of those fancy newfangled computer things costs about $2500—roughly as much as a hundred books purchased for, let’s say, $24.99 each, though where can you get a library-bound book for $25?—altogether it’s shoddy scaremongering writing, sure, but has at least maybe some kind of tenuous basis in reality.
Posted By: unreliable narrator on January 7, 2009 at 10:48 amAs much as any of it does. Which is to say, hardly at all.
On the other hand, Ms. Urban isn’t quite right—a book by James Patterson costs much less than a book of poetry, even one by that well-known writer, “some poet.” Patterson and other genre novelists get their work printed in mass-market format, which costs, per book, a fraction of a penny to produce—approximately the same cost pound-for-pound as toilet paper, a sales rep once told me—and of course most poets publish in trade format. Until we’re dead. And then we happily join the world of James Patterson. (Remember those adorably weird editions of Dickinson/Frost/Carl Sandburg you could buy, once upon the time, at Waldenbooks and G. Dalton?)
Right. Back to my oatmeal.
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Hey Unreliable,
Posted By: Travis Nichols on January 7, 2009 at 12:05 pmIf we ever meet in person, you’ve got one bowl of oatmeal on me. Thanks for the thoughtful response.
Travis
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At the beginning of the 21st century, the publishing industry is being transformed by new technologies. Over 500 years ago, book production was revolutionized by an earlier new technology – the printing press and movable type. A whole new industry grew out of this invention, an industry in which books were mass-produced for the first time. By the end of the 15th century printed books had largely ousted manuscripts in the commercial book trade; their predominance as an information medium was not seriously challenged until after the turn of the twentieth century, and even then only at the margins. The printed book became one of the symbols of Western culture.
Posted By: Aaron Fagan on January 7, 2009 at 3:12 pmChristian Dior was pals with Picasso and Erik Satie and the poet Max Jacob. In rebuilding the lavish haute couture of France some scholars say he is largely to credit for rebuilding France’s post-war economy. Where the fashion of the time was using a minimum of fabric (bowing to economic pressures of the time), he built elaborate dresses that used yards and yards of the best fabrics he could find. The work was seen as a bold affirmation of the best of French cultural heritage. Fast forward and he died seeing his designs and name sold off for mass-production by American franchises using polyester blends and the like.
So perhaps fashion designers would do well to pursue haute typographie.
Yes, books are books … I long for a book to be a book again.
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I started in small press publishing and distributing a decade ago, and unless by “small press” the article means publishers doing runs of 5,000+ (which I’d call a mid-list or independent press at the very least), I can promise no one then (as no one now) was selling 2,000 copies of a single book to libraries ever. Really a remarkably silly thing to say–possibly something the reporter misunderstood or simply made up?
Posted By: Brent Cunningham on January 9, 2009 at 3:33 pmAt Small Press Distribution, where I work, our overall sales to libraries (including sales to jobbers, who are middle-people specifically for libraries) have gone up dramatically over the last ten years. This is mostly due to our ability to send our data farther, and to send it quickly and efficiently, in fairly standard electronic formats. So the computer cuts both ways.
The article is certainly correct that it’s hard to even break even running a small press, and that’s not even counting the publisher’s labor time, which is almost always donated. It’s particularly tough to do so with a small poetry press. At the same time, the numbers in this article are at the very least misleading, and I hope no one decides not to look into becoming a small press poetry publisher because of them. For instance, $5 a book for a run of 500 is a meaningless number to throw out: in book printing, the page count is largely what controls the price, so $5 is cheap for a 400 page book, absurd for a 60 page book, etc.
In any case, if you’re savvy and sharp and have a head for numbers, there are ways to stay relatively solvent as a small press poetry publisher, and in my opinion it’s a deeply rewarding and worthwhile pursuit, so don’t let these kinds of articles deter you from talking to people actually doing it (i.e. talk to some of SPD’s 400+ publishers)…
yrs,
Brent Cunningham
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On point as always, Brent. Thank you.
Posted By: Travis Nichols on January 9, 2009 at 4:08 pmReport this comment
For those of you that don’t already know, Brent has an excellent book of poems that was published several years ago by Ugly Duckling Presse called Bird & Forest.
Posted By: Aaron Fagan on January 9, 2009 at 4:21 pmIt is truly a book … not just as an object, but also in the craft of the content.
Publishing in general could learn a lot from UDP. And SPD.
As for the numbers … I have said this before… I think it would be useful to make the actual numbers known. When we see Billy Collins and Mary Oliver at the top of the heap … how vast is the gulf between them and number one on the SPD list? And how many units from Billy Collins to the bottom of the NYT list for fiction? And so on … I’m sick of the grim news and scare tactics that have been used … and the complaints against the art itself … when will there be an honest, no-or-low drama inventory of the business of poetry.
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Hi, Aaron,
Posted By: Brent Cunningham on January 12, 2009 at 3:31 pmThanks for mentioning my book…
I’m sympathetic to your desire for more transparency in sales numbers for poetry, and I’m fairly obsessed myself with such #’s, but they’re quite hard to get, largely because they’re never just neutral–they’re always in the context of selling a product. For instance, larger publishers routinely announce the numbers of books sold of the author’s previous book, but they’ll do tricky things like give you the gross sales number when the book actually saw heavy returns, or they’ll frequently announce a big initial print run (i.e. to give the bookbuyer confidence that this is going to be a major book with lots of support behind it) yet quietly have a mechanism where they won’t *really* print the announced number until they see the sales trend in the first week or two, etc. Plus, as I’ve said before in this space, even with something like Bookscan, which records point-of-sale purchases, there’s still no way to tell between a book actually read versus a book bought as, say, a well-meaning gift where the spine never cracks. Meanwhile, Bookscan isn’t in libraries or many independent and university stores yet, and may never be.
Perhaps more to the point, sales numbers are, thanks to capitalism, considered proprietary figures owned by the business that owns the products. If SPD announced that x SPD poetry book sold x amount, the publisher could be quite unhappy with us, not just ethically but I believe legally. As I understand it, those are technically their personal figures that they can announce or not as (and when) they want.
Of course, I am allowed to talk about general figures and averages, especially as it might help people make better decisions about running their own presses. But even in that case I find it easier to talk about initial print runs, because that’s all I’ve generally gotten from talking to people at X University Press or X major press.
Thus, it’s my impression, from asking a good number of people, that there’s surprisingly little difference between initial runs of poetry on (a) more successful small presses, (b) most university presses, and (c) major ny congolmerate presses. If it’s not a collected or selected or anthology, group (a) generally does runs of 500-1,000, group (b) does about the same or maybe a few hundred more on average, and group (c) does more like 1,000-2,000, often more like 1,500. Then there’s maybe 10 to 20 poets just below the level of Oliver and Collins, like an Ashbery, where the first run is probably more like 2,000-3,000. Maybe in the case of Oliver and Collins themselves it goes up to something like 5,000 or a few thousand higher, with possibility of reprints. And I imagine that’s about how the sales shake out in the end. If things work out well, about 80% of the initial run sells over the lifetime of the book. If things don’t go well, then you’ve got half the run or even more in storage.
If I had to guess, I’d say the very bottom of the NY Times trade fiction list probably sells in the neighborhood of 20K-30K lifetime, by comparison. But I’m pulling that out of thin air, and somebody probably has a more accurate sense of that than me.
But, again, if what we want to know is whether people are actually reading the books (much less whether they actually *like* the books) we’ll have to wait for the forthcoming dis/utopia when microchips are implanted in the brain of all infants.
yrs,
Brent Cunningham
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???
Posted By: Bill Knott on January 13, 2009 at 12:25 pmI’m not in the pub biz, but it seems clear they
(publishers) are not in the practice of throwing
good money after bad——
in other words, they won’t do second printings
(much less third or fourth)
if the first doesn’t sell,
right?—
So if I look a copy of a Sharon Olds book and on the
copyright page it says “14th printing”,
can’t I take that as a valid indicator
that more people are buying (and presumably
reading) that book by Olds
than a book by X or Y which the publisher
never does even a second or third printing of?
Can’t I conclude from looking at the number
of printings that Olds sells more poetry
books than X or Y?
I don’t understand why you experts are saying
“the sales numbers for poetry are hard to get”——
???
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Hi Bill,
Posted By: Brent Cunningham on January 16, 2009 at 12:45 pmOlds is in that small group of poets I mentioned who reliably outsell all others by a significant margin. I said 10-20, but maybe it’s 25-30. If it’s more than I’d be surprised. Might be fun to try to list them, it’s certainly possible. Someone could just read through a couple years of the Poetry Foundation Bestseller list, exclude those who shoot into the top 20 for less than 6 or 7 weeks, and you’d have your list.
And it’s not that a general sense of the figures is that hard to get. What’s hard to get are the exact numbers. For instance, a reprint could be 500 copies (or, especially with digital printing, a lot less now), or could be 3,000, so 14 printings could be anywhere from 7K to 42K sold. Tho even 7K is way higher than the average for a book of poetry.
Why do these 25 or so outsell all others? I’d say some key reasons are because (a) as the 25 poets already selling the most and showing up on bestseller lists they’re automatically presumed to be the best by English teachers who don’t really have much interest in poetry, and thus they’re regularly taught to undergraduates (classes of 20-100) where each student is required or at least encouraged to buy the book, (b) as the perceived top names in contemporary american poetry, they’re the 25 who reliably get booked at major university-sponsored readings where people tend to buy poetry books more often than just about anywhere, partly out of the “souvenir” mentality, and (c) the customer who enters a bookstore knowing little or nothing about poetry but looking for a contemporary poetry book as a gift or for themselves will be steered by booksellers, who themselves may not have the least interest in poetry, to one of these 25 since they’ve apparently proven themselves quantitatively.
Hence, for poets who have enough cultural sanction as popular-thus-good, the machine starts to run under its own power in many ways. Sales breed sales. Maybe they’re really the best poets by some qualitative measure or other, maybe not. But because of a, b, and c, I think there’s room to treat the sales of those 25 with at least a healthy critical skepticism. Certainly, 42K doesn’t really make Olds 84 times more widely or passionately read than a poet selling 500, since most the 500 sales for the other poet are generally to people who had to really seek out the book and would therefore be more likely to attentively read the book.
After you get past those 25-30, the sales figures seem to me to be clumped extremely close together, whether small press, university press, or major conglomerate press.
yrs,
Brent Cunningham
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