McSweeney's New Status: Non-Profit
New York Times reports that off-beat, intelligent publishing house, McSweeney's, is adding a new feather to its cap: non-profit status. The San Francisco-based publisher, founded by Dave Eggers, has been churning out risky material for the last 16 years. What's with the change? NYT's Alexandra Alter is here to helps us unpack the headline:
McSweeney’s, the imprint founded 16 years ago by the writer Dave Eggers, has always been something of an anomaly in the publishing world.
With its independent book imprint, quarterly literary journal and monthly magazine, McSweeney’s mission was always to put out quirky, whimsical, commercially risky material without bending to the crass pressures of the marketplace. Huge profits — or, really, any profits — were never really part of the business plan.
Now, McSweeney’s is officially becoming what it has unofficially been for years: a nonprofit in the mold of small, independent nonprofit publishers like Graywolf Press, Heyday Books and Copper Canyon, Mr. Eggers said on Thursday.
“For 15 years now, it’s been a break-even operation,” Mr. Eggers said in an interview. “I’ve always been attracted to books and projects that we love and are passionate about, and it doesn’t always intersect with books that will sell a million copies.”
Mr. Eggers, 44, said that turning McSweeney’s into a nonprofit won’t result in scaling back its publishing operation or its output of around 25 books a year. Instead, he said, it will allow the company to be more ambitious in areas that traditional publishers have largely neglected because they hold little commercial promise, like poetry and foreign translations.
The Believer, McSweeney’s monthly magazine, will become a bimonthly magazine beginning in January, but it will be longer and have more pieces of investigative journalism, Mr. Eggers said.
New projects in the works include an expanded series of poetry books; a fiction anthology from Caribbean authors, edited by the Jamaican novelist Marlon James; a collection of writing by women from South Sudan; and collection about American waterways, with work from journalists, novelists and poets. [...]
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