Publishing

In 1820, a brief article entitled "Who Reads An American Book?" appeared in The Edinburgh Review. It summarized a British attitude and supposition, widely held in the United States itself, that English Literature was English, not American, and that America would never contribute anything to the world of letters. And this just as Washington Irving was publishing The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, containing "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," a great American short story with a very serious legacy. Sidney Smith, though he voiced a popular sentiment, couldn't see very far into the future.

Almost 200 years later, I hope it's clear that the question is absurd, but a similar question is being asked now: Who reads a literary journal?

Though the literary journal is one of the first forms of publication to take stable root in the United States, and, after the broadside, the pamphlet, and the newspaper, one of the longest continuously-running forms of publication in this country, it is now, it seems, in a precarious state of supposed irrelevance. As the catch-line for Ted Genoways' essay in the newest issue of Mother Jones ponders: "Lit mags were once launching pads for great writers and big ideas. Is it time to write them off?"

As Genoways considers, some long-standing titles, such as The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, and New England Review, have sustained sizable budget cuts, are being transformed into electronic-only publications, or have been given a short period of time to become self-sustaining or disappear.

In a discussion on Middlebury College's president's blog this summer, the terms of justifying the cuts were fairly simple: the journal doesn't do anything. Despite demonstrations to the contrary, the position remained stable, echoing, I think, a popular sentiment, that the literary journal doesn't do anything.

I suspect this line of concern, which may express some feeling that contemporary literature may not do anything, is abetted by the general sense that, as newspapers fold up shop and e-readers emerge (weekly it seems), print is antique and soon to be fossilized.

And this misses a very important point. Format is one thing---the book versus the e-reader---but content is quite another. What are you paying for when you buy a book? Is it the paper? Is it the production cost? These things certainly have the most direct impact on the cost of a book, but you're really paying for expertise: the unique expertise of the writer, in his or her craft or imagination, and the expertise of the editors and designers and booksellers who bring the book to you.

Just so with the literary journal. You're investing not in a paper factory but in imagination and language, and the cost of this investment is, in most cases, fairly small.

Our 13th issue is almost ready to ship to readers, those who are investing in these kinds of expertise, and it is now available to you for the lowest price we've ever been able to offer---$10 a copy direct or $13 for a one-year subscription (two issues). That's a fairly small threshold.

So, whoever you are, reading this blog, maybe you'll also read a literary journal. Maybe that journal will be Copper Nickel. Our web server tells us we're reaching 3000 unique readers each month. If half of those readers would subscribe to the print journal, that print operation would be around for a long time to come.

And, who knows, maybe we'll all be around to see what comes out of the journals make a lasting contribution to a literature, despite whatever the prevailing temperament may be.

Maybe now more than ever, literary journals and university and independent presses are poised to fill the void created by the major publishing houses that are primarily driven by the bottom line. A few years ago, I attended a writing conference where, at a panel discussion, I listened to a New York agent say that literary prose and poetry were no more important than a tube of toothpaste. "It's all about the marketing," she said. "End caps at Barnes & Noble, Oprah's Book Club, and The New York Times best-seller list—if you can't guarantee one of those, there is no market and there is no hope because there is no audience."

No. That's not true. At The Southern Review, we know we have a diverse and engaged audience interested in the best new prose and poetry being written by the world's establish and emerging authors....

Read more in the Summer 2009 issue (v45 n3) of The Southern Review

Copper Nickel editor Jake Adam York discusses the Facebook cause "Support Literary Journals" with Stacy Muszynskyi on American Short Fiction's blog.

Simmons Buntin, contributor to Copper Nickel 11 and editor of Terrain.org, has posted a story about the latest literary journal to come under fire, Isotope. Follow this link to find out how you can help.

Reported by Poets & Writers:

The New England Review has until the end of 2011 to become self-supporting or it will lose its sponsorship, Middlebury College announced this week. The thirty-year-old magazine was included in a list of recommended cuts released on Tuesday by the Vermont college's Budget Oversight Committee, which is aiming to trim $20 million from the school's spending.

Full story here.

***

Longer story at Inside Higher Ed, beginning thus:

With some university presses facing budget cuts that could effectively kill their operations, maybe it shouldn't be a surprise. But experts on literary magazines are nonetheless surprised -- and worried -- by the announcement this week out of Middlebury College that it will cease sponsorship of The New England Review by 2011 if the publication doesn't become self-supporting.

The problem, according to the editor of the Review and experts on literary magazines, is that they don't have business models that work, and so must rely on philanthropic support (which is hard to get going now) or the sponsorship of a college (as is the case for many of the top literary magazines). In recent years, no college forced a literary magazine to fend for itself -- a move that would effectively kill most such publications. In 2003, Washington and Lee University floated the idea of ending or sharply cutting support for Shenandoah; the university pulled back from its plan amid strong criticism from the literary world.

Nearly seventy-five years later, Southern Review remains one of the most important quarterlies in the country, and LSU Press has earned a reputation as one of the nation's most revered university presses. In the last three decades alone, LSU Press's literary titles have garnered four Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and its exceptional history list has won three Bancroft Prizes and the Lincoln Prize. Yet, LSU's new chancellor, Michael Martin, has targeted both Southern Review and LSU Press as entities within the university that, due to the economic downturn, will now need to contribute additional revenue to the university--or else. According to the preliminary budget report issued by the university, "it is very possible they cannot generate the revenue needed and will close." In a prepared statement released after the budget was made public earlier this week, Martin praised LSU's nationally recognized publications as "a very valuable asset to this university" but insisted that "we must protect the academic core of LSU first and foremost."

From VQR. You should read this.

Time has an interesting (though not entirely timely) article on the future of book publishing.

Some of this we already know: it's getting harder to make it in the book industry.

Some recent facts:

Publishing houses--among them Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Doubleday and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt--are laying off staff left and right. Random House is in the midst of a drastic reorganization. Salaries are frozen across the industry. Whispers of bankruptcy are fluttering around Borders; Barnes & Noble just cut 100 jobs at its headquarters, a measure unprecedented in the company's history. Publishers Weekly (PW) predicts that 2009 will be "the worst year for publishing in decades."

I'd say, in Denver we've had some local measures, including the closing of one of our favorite independent bookstores, Book Buffs of Denver, in November, and the recent shuttering of our long-time printer National Hirschfeld.

More interesting is the account of Lisa Genova's transit from unknown author to agented and signed talent through the conduit iUniverse, one of many growing self-publishing services, provided. Though this is also nothing new. Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass (he even typeset and printed the first edition) in 1855. A century later, A. R. Ammons self-published his first book, Ommateum in 1955. He didn't move from his early obscurity very quickly, but a decade later he was a major force in American poetry, and another decade beyond that he'd been inducted into the big leagues by critics like Harold Bloom.

The technology is changing. It's much easier to find self-publishers and much easier to take control of the publication process. I know several young poets who've decided on this route---distributing their books POD through lulu.com (for example). This is happening much faster. And, yes, a persistent author, like Lisa Genova, can break out of that initial obscurity into notice. Yes, good work can make itself known and get the recognition and backing it deserves.

Still, and here's what interests me, the publisher---in Genova's case Simon & Schuster---retains a cultural and even economic power (however uncertain the latter). Through the self-publishing conduit an author rises not only into notice but into relative (economic and cultural) wealth. The publisher-author relationship still adds value to the work: the publisher is not merely a conduit.

I can't say Copper Nickel makes anybody wealthy, but I do think we create value here, both by publishing something and by placing it in relationship to other works that make it's particularly valuable qualities more visible, and, as I hope you know if you're reading this, we make what we publish look good. One of my persistent concerns with self-published work is that it often isn't designed very well. Authors do often know their work better than anyone else, but when an author is left to his or her own devices, tastes, and decisions, the product often isn't as good as it could be. The relationship between the publisher, who knows books better than any author, and the author who knows this book better than anyone, does produce better results.

By the same token, the relationship between a publisher and his or her readers is also a productive relationship. Copper Nickel is a relatively small operation, and right now we have one product: this print journal that comes out every six months. We want to sell this to you. More to the point, we want you to read it, which is why we're embarking on a number of expansions.

In the next four weeks, we'll be launching an online reader, inspired in part by Agni and Arts & Letters Daily, and in part by the great work being done by The Southeast Review, The Missouri Review and so many others. We'll be remixing some content, adding some new content, and linking our content to other items of interest we find in the wild.

And later this year, we'll be offering iPhone/Stanza-optimized versions of even more material as well as podcasts. We're still not big fans of Kindle, but we're hopeful for the advent of Plastic Logic's Reader and are getting ready, as well, to start using Issuu to deliver even more material out to you, the interested party.

As always, if you want to be among the first to know, keep visiting here, sign up for our mailing list, or join our Facebook group.

We look forward to more of that publisher-reader-author dialogue in the coming year.