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November 29, 2008

Branding the editors

Last week I found myself in a colloquy. And its primary twitteration was someone else’s assertion that the reading public could be led to recognize the name, and therefore the recommendation, of an acquiring editor. The thought was that if editors went public—via podcasts, blogs, YouTube, Facebook, engagement in various social media networks—readers who had enjoyed one (for instance) literary novel acquired and championed by a particular editor would buy another novel that had reached them by passing across the same publishing desk.

It’s an attractive thought—one that gives hope to those of us who labor away with a certain anonymity. I want it to be possible. And so, just in case, I’ve put here a deck of the works of fiction that Greg Michalson and I acquired, edited and published in the years before we launched Unbridled. (For the rest, you can review the entire Unbridled catalog here .) Are the changes in the industry sufficient to make a history such as ours of interest to readers of good fiction? Yes, I know that the other (more important) variable would be the readers' judgment of the list itself.

But certainly, such a development—readers acknowledging editors—would require significant evolution beyond the form that our branch of the industry has taken over the past decade or so.

Around the time we began publishing fiction in 1994—at MacMurray & Beck, with Laura Hendrie’s award-winning debut, Stygo —Barnes & Noble was opening its earliest superstores and the assertive narrowing of the reading public’s attention was underway. Fortunately, significant print column inches were still being devoted to book reviews in those days. This was good for us because our books were (and are) “review driven.” So we were able to bring significant attention to some tremendous authors whom we were debuting. You’ll see in the pre-Unbridled deck that 1999 was a notable year for us: Debut novels by Susan Vreeland, Patricia Henley (which book became a National Book Award finalist), William Gay, and Steve Yarbrough; a second luminous novel by Frederick Reuss (indeed, his second NYT notable); and the introduction of Elliott Perlman to American readers. (An annotation may be necessary here: Unfortunately, what immediately and surprisingly followed that year’s success was the M&B owners’ pulling their money out of publishing because they were missing the rise in NASDAQ; our backlist and contracts eventually went to MacAdam/Cage.)

Anyway, soon, as you’ll recall, the sluices were narrowed so that book review editors were forced by their publishers to attend primarily to what New York was putting the most money behind. The suddenly overwhelming power of the chains was pointed toward those same books on front tables all across the country. And so it began that most (not all) recognized novels received attention in proportion to their attachment to one sort of celebrity (Brand Authors, including a small canon of literary masters) or another (Oprah, GMA, Victoria Beckham . . . ). In this world, which is not yet fully gone, review-driven novels by unknown authors have had a hard time breaking out. Indeed, “review driven” has become a somewhat quaint concept.

Could this be changing even for the msm? Recent local newspaper reviews (of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666) and some independent-press appearances on the NYT Notables list seem promising to me.

But what is most invigorating in the current state of Bookworld is that increasingly folks who share an interest in the same kinds of books—including the commercial literature we handle—can gather online to converse and recommend and make lists that are suddenly far less influenced by where the conglomerated publishing empires are putting their money, by what celebrities are reading, or by what the chain stores have decided to stock and have been paid to promote adequately.

I'm pleased to report that positive reviews of our own In Hovering Flight, by Joyce Hinnefeld, have been widespread on the blogs, and this seems to be driving the book steadily, happily forward.

That, of course, is exactly what my interlocutors were asserting. And that’s admittedly why I’m now reading 2666. I mean, I may have been one of the only so-called American literate who didn’t know of the book at all when I began reading Scott Esposito's blogs about it.

Of course I agree that this development can potentially be a tremendous boon for independent presses and for independent booksellers (a realm where they do not have to go head-to-head against B&N). And it definitely is good both for readers and especially for authors who have no “platform.” Indeed, the online connectedness of a blogging author IS a platform. In the developing social-media reading world, I can even imagine that a second (or third) novel by a talented author might receive good notice regardless of the BookScan number of that writer’s previous novel. That is, I can now imagine the continuance of literature, which virtually everything in the age of Conglomeration and Celebrity Publishing has aligned to smother. (Continuing American literature is an end run around Bookscan.)

This is what I have meant in saying that looking forward in the publishing world is not solely related to foreseeing which e-book reader will become dominant. It is more importantly a function of the new social behaviors of readers and the coming assertions of authors. Whether the editor as a brand name can impact that process remains for me a question, but I'm not without optimism for independent publishing.

More to come . . .

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