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September 07, 2005
Time for Vision and Revision
I had wanted to post an entry here last week. But in light of Katrina it seemed trivial if not unsavory to do so. These are only publishing matters, after all. With the first evacuees arriving in Colorado — as elsewhere — some sense that the nation is not still only flailing in high water arises. There’s nothing I can say that hasn’t been said, at least silently.
In the August 22 issue of Business Week, Jonathan Karp explained his new imprint, Warner Twelve — so named because it is slated to publish twelve (12) books a year. He is doing this, he says, to afford him the opportunity to promise “authors and their literary agents that we will publishing nothing other than their books for a full month.”
We at Unbridled suspect he will quickly learn that — for the books he handles that are neither blockbuster novels nor celebrity-authored — “a full month” is nowhere near long enough.
What is curious about this interview is that neither Karp nor “Business Week’s Elizabeth Woyke” acknowledges in any way that what Karp is being allowed to do at TW is to function as a small press functions (albeit “with the help of the marketing machines at the Time Warner Book Group”). On the contrary, Woyke wants to assert that the approach to publishing promised by Warner Twelve is an innovation.
Modesty should prevent me from pointing out that this is precisely what Phyllis Grann wanted to occur at Putnam with BlueHen Books. But it seems important to point out that the BlueHen effort (begun six years ago now) wasn’t innovation either. It was simply an attempt to move old-fashioned publishing values back into an industry that had become — and still is — dominated by its media connections rather than by the quality of work it handles.
But maybe I’m seeing this wrong. Perhaps it is brave of Karp to apply those old values — that old, sometimes lost commitment to quality writing — to the kinds of books he intends to handle. From what he says in the interview, it seems clear those books will be much like the movie-aimed and celebrity-prone books that have given him his greatest successes.
At least his approach — and the interview — brings those values up again. We believe, with Karp, that the way through the swollen jungle of books published each year is precisely by using the blade of those literary values in partnership with the most gifted of writers.
Absolutely everyone in small-press publishing knows the worth of developing close relations with talented authors and working with them to ensure that each book becomes the best it can possibly be before it goes to press.
“Talented authors deserve a massive amount of attention,” Karp explains to everyone else, “and the best way to get them attention is for a publisher to focus relentlessly and exclusively on their book for as long as possible.”
Of course, that is what publishing has always been, what it has remained in the rich halls of independent publishers across the country even as consolidations took over the Island industry and the media took over the bestseller lists.
Beyond this, I would venture that most independent publishers in America release fewer than 12 books a year. If Karp is to be lauded for his approach — and I agree that he should be — it would seem logical to praise independent presses even more highly for not trying each year to handle quite so many quality books as that.
Fred Ramey
Posted in: Publishers Blog, | Keywords: publishers blog
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Comments
What you said above touched my heart and lead me to wonder if you ever consider unsolicited fiction manuscripts. Thank you for your time.
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Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) 09/07 03:30 AM