WRITING
My Publisher Went to Hell and All I Got Was This Lousy T-ShirtCHICAGO 08 December 2008 |
|
Friday, October 24, my cell phone rang. My publisher, Willy Blackmore of Impetus Press, was on the phone from Long Beach, California. I thought he was calling to talk about an Impetus Press fundraiser some friends of mine were throwing in Chicago in a couple week’s time. Instead, he told me that Impetus was bankrupt. The press was closing its doors immediately. They had six titles in their queue, one of which was my second novel, London Calling. Now, all six would be without a publisher. Willy’s voice was quavering as he broke this news. He is the grandson of one of the founders of FSG; uber-editor Jonathan Galassi is his cousin; publishing is in his blood. He is also all of about 24 years old. He and his live-in girlfriend (my editor Jennifer Banash, a woman of a more reasonable age even if she looks about as old as Willy) had been supporting the press with their own money for the past four months, and were so broke that they, personally, were in a financial rut almost as deep as Impetus’. Yet that morning, my heart sinking with an almost surreal disappointment, it was hard to feel sorry for Willy and Jennifer. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself. I got off the phone as quickly as possible, head reeling.
Like almost all writers, I have been disappointed before. In 2005, my brilliant literary agent, whose creative opinions I respected more than perhaps anyone else to whom I’d ever shown my work, disappeared for a month, causing his boutique agency to collapse and his some-75 clients to end up out on the street. Turned out, he was holed up in some hotel using a suicidal amount of crack and generally trying to annihilate himself. I knew he’d been in rehab before, and yes, his behavior was sometimes erratic, but like a bad boyfriend who is really good in bed, most of his clients, myself included, pretty much worshipped him and thought his creative input irreplaceable. But unlike some of those other clients, who had National Book Award and Pulitzer honors, I was still a book-virgin, abandoned right on the brink of my novel being ready to send out (it was, in fact, on an exclusive with the first editor to see it when my agent disappeared.) Did I mention that this all happened about three weeks after I’d had a miscarriage? I pretty much sank into despair. My amazing husband whisked me (and our twin daughters) off to Mexico, where we spent an obscene amount of money at the Four Seasons Punta Mita until I felt like I could face going home.
Once home, my first novel, My Sister’s Continent received an offer from an indie publisher and—three months later, even though the doctors had said it was “extremely unlikely” without fertility treatments, which I had refused, I was pregnant again. Thus began one of those proverbial “good stretches” in life: in my case, My Sister’s Continent was released the month before our son was born, and almost immediately the novel went into a second printing. I spent a giddy half-year alternating between nursing and dashing off to readings to promote the novel; my husband, David, was googling me constantly to see which bloggers were discussing the book. It was exhausting, but heady too. Though like most indie press authors, I didn’t really see any money from the experience, between reviews and events my career definitely felt “launched.” And sure enough, about a year after the novel had come out, I had one of those giddy experiences you dream about before your first book is published . . . a Ph.D. grad student in Iowa emailed me to let me know that she had written about My Sister’s Continent in her dissertation. I was over the moon! But it got even better from there. My “new best friend” Jennifer Banash was no ordinary graduate student, but also the founding editor of an independent press—yes, Impetus. She asked if I happened to have another manuscript available. Though I wasn’t ready to submit my third novel, I had an earlier novel from back in my old grad-school days that had never really been seen—I sent it to her, and within a week had an offer from Impetus to publish it.
Holy shit. That was easy. After my first novel circulating around NYC for about two years, having close calls that always fell through (all before even dealing with my agent’s disappearance!), placing my second novel seemed like a cake-walk. This must be what it’s like when you already have a book out, I told myself. I’ve paid my dues and it’ll all get easier from here.
Ha.
Well, I’m getting ahead of myself. For awhile, it seemed more than true. The Impetus team, Jennifer and Willy, not only became my publishers, but my close friends. They would come to Chicago and stay in our basement guest-room, go out to brunch with my husband and kids, take me to dinner and pick up the tab. We knew many of the same Chicago lit people and went to the same parties, had dinner at the same mutual friends’ restaurants. It felt like what I’d heard about old world publishing: where the editor and writer become the best of friends and are committed to one another for the long haul. Jennifer and I were working on revisions for the novel, and I found her as insightful and invested an editor as my former beloved agent. Then, about eight or nine months ago, came the icing on the cake: Impetus Press had applied for a marketing grant for my novel, London Calling, from an innovative literary ventures capitalists group out of NYC called the Literary Ventures Fund. LVF takes on one title at a time (they’ve taken on 14 over the past 5 years of their existence) and invests both time and money into promoting titles they believe can appeal to a wider audience than most indie presses can reach alone. Not only do they send out review copies and work with distributors and booksellers to get their titles placed in bookstores on a “no returns” basis, but they also have automatic relationships with entities like the Barnes & Noble online book club—opportunities beyond the scope of what most indie presses or writers can hope for. When LVF voted unanimously to take on London Calling as its next project, Jennifer called me in the middle of my teaching a class and squealed, “Go out and buy some expensive shoes!” LVF’s first order of business was to ask Impetus to increase my print run from the usual 1,000 or so that a small indie puts out to 5,000, and to start raising the money right away so that a second printing would be possible. That night, my husband and I drank champagne.
Flash forward to late summer, 2008. Reality was setting in. While I was in the midst of working closely with LVF on my author’s questionnaire and other fun things like that, Impetus was beginning to deal with some heavy financial realities. Jennifer and Willy had relocated to California for Jennifer’s day-job (teaching, of course), and spent a bundle on the move, and Jennifer’s job was all-consuming, leaving her almost no time left for Impetus. Willy, who had yet to get a job in LA, seemed to be holding down the Impetus fort virtually solo. But these problems were minor compared to what was happening to Impetus’ finances. Their distributor, Biblio, had been bought by a larger corporation about a year prior, and they were now being charged for returns on a monthly basis rather than only a couple times per year. This meant that Impetus was being charged money more frequently than it was actually seeing revenue, and they were struggling to keep up with payments. Jennifer was putting her own teaching salary towards keeping the press afloat. With the Borders Group in trouble, returns from Borders were particularly brutal. It was not unusual for Impetus to face monthly bills of 3K just on returns—with an annual rate of 36K. For those not familiar with indie presses from the “inside,” that is about a small press’s entire annual budget. Just paying returns had wiped Impetus out. Yet the fees to their distributor HAD to be paid, if they were to keep their existing titles in circulation and prevent their going out of print. They had run out of money for printing new books—particularly one like mine, with an LVF-imposed minimum print run of 5,000, which translates into about 10K minimum printing costs. By mid-September, a crisis point was being hit.
Some scrambling ensued. LVF had already agreed to lower the print run to 3,000, so some of my Chicago friends jumped forward to throw a fundraiser to make sure London Calling could go to press. Meanwhile, Jennifer and Willy looked into cheaper distribution options. Small Press Distribution (SPD) has the friendliest policies for indie presses, so they contacted them and made sure they could jump over. After getting the green light from SPD, they contacted Biblio to get out of their contract, switch distributors, and thereby save the press . . .
They were told it would cost almost 8K to get out of their contract. This money would be “insurance” against the next year’s returns. Impetus did not HAVE 8K anymore . . . that was why they needed out of the contract to begin with. To make matters worse, Jennifer and Willy didn’t even have that money themselves, to—as many founders of indie publishers have done—throw into their business. Jennifer’s salary had been going towards Impetus for months, and they were destitute both personally and as a business. (Willy had a low paying art gallery gig that already he would have to leave to get a “real” job to help the couple get back on their feet.) There were no more options. By October 24, Impetus was no more. Jennifer and Willy dissolved the LLC, hoping that Biblio would realize they had no money, period, and would not decide to sue them. (This, to the best of my knowledge, is still up in the air.) If Biblio pursued legal action, they would have to declare personal bankruptcy.
One of Impetus’ pending titles was AT the printer at the time. Impetus could not even afford for it to come out. (That title, Nick Antosca’s second book, was rescued by Word Riot shortly afterwards, with a much more limited print run well under even the usual indie fare.)
This announcement of Impetus’ demise sent small ripples of interest around the literary community. GalleyCat featured a piece about it, and here in Chicago, my loss of a book deal (right before a scheduled fundraiser for the now-defunct press, that had already been getting media attention) was treated a bit like the divorce of a D-list celebrity: the Chicago Reader, TimeOut Chicago, and several smaller Chicago-focused blogs all ran stories on the debacle, albeit thankfully from a kind and sympathetic perspective. Of particular interest to the media was the irony of my having obtained marketing support from a prestigious outside group like LVF, only to find my novel without a publisher. The stories ran lines like, “So close and yet so far” and “Gina Frangello seeks new publisher.” My inbox was bombarded with notes of consolation.
Side note: like a messy D-list divorce, if you are going to have a stroke of hideous luck, it is preferable to do so “off-screen” and privately. When you are miserable and frantic over the loss of your publisher, nothing makes the matter worse than then having to read about it—and have all your friends read about it!—in the media.
From all this, one good thing emerged: LVF remained committed to London Calling. Ande Zellman, the Editorial Director, kept insisting that this could be an “opportunity,” allowing London Calling to get a “bigger” deal than I’d have had with Impetus, with a more generous print run and a real advance and a bigger marketing budget, all of which would help both me and LVF with our end of the work. LVF offered to act as the literary agent for the novel, and just a couple weeks ago finally began submitting it to a few carefully targeted publishers. Their endorsement of the novel, and commitment to marketing it when it is eventually released, is the only thing keeping me from a pit of hopelessness at times. Surely—especially in an economy like this—having a built in marketing team that will do work and spend money has GOT to be a boon in a publisher’s eyes, and the stamp of approval from an organization that has only supported 14 titles over 5 years can’t hurt either, right?
And yet. Well, amidst stories coming out daily about the imminent collapse of the publishing industry, excessive optimism would no doubt be unwise. When Houghton-Mifflin is putting a freeze on all new acquisitions and Random House is firing editors left and right, is it realistic to expect any good news? The unspoken double bind, of course, is that the presses to whom LVF’s marketing support would appeal MOST are those without their own in-house marketing engines or without a big PR buget . . . yet those are the very presses that, especially now, probably cannot afford LVF’s terms when it comes to print run and their cut of the profits (which come directly from the publisher.) LVF remains stridently optimistic, and we have yet to hear back from any of the 3 publishers currently considering the novel. And so I wait.
If there’s one lesson to be learned in this industry, it seems to be that things never really “get easier.” And like the rest of the economy, the news in publishing will probably get a lot, lot worse before it gets better. For now, London Calling is one of the casualties.
Author’s Note: For those not in the publishing world, the concept of “returns” from the distributor may be a confusing one. And confusing it is! Basically, book distribution is the only business in the world to run on an archaic, Depression Era model of booksellers being able to order books at no cost or risk to themselves, with the publishers taking on ALL the economic risk. Therefore, a large chain like Borders may decide to take willy-nilly risks like ordering 1,000 copies of a novel by a new author, based, say, on a rave review in Publisher’s Weekly, or on the strong sales at the Borders store in that writer’s home town. But if that author’s publisher doesn’t have a giant marketing engine and budget to “reinforce” the good PR of reviews, and the author doesn’t have paid-for prominent bookshelf placement, ads in major venues like the NYTimes Book Review, or a well-publicized national book tour, the chances of having a sell-through rate of even 50% can be slim. As a result, hundreds and hundreds of books may then be “returned” to the distributor, at the publisher’s cost (for storage in the distributor’s warehouse, etc.) For this reason, many indie publishers have stopped working with the chain stores—who are most apt to over-order—altogether, though this only fuels the “ghettoization” of indie titles, which then can’t be found at the big stores where most customers shop. It’s a scary gamble, and many presses, hoping to give their writers maximum exposure and the highest chance of selling well, continue to opt to work with the chains. It’s a gamble that has bankrupted more than a few small publishers, Impetus now among them.
|
||
Related Posts |
No comments yet.