Tony, what is your minimum level of sales?
On 4 Jul 2011, at 19:35:33, Tony Frazer wrote:
I thought I'd toss in my two penn'orth here. I agree with the phrase "unnecessarily fraught" below. If you look back at what actually happened -- and I have very little inside knowledge of the chain of events, by the way -- Salt was run from Chris's spare room, and managed by the husband-and-wife team; they kept expenses down and published a lot of fine books that needed publishing, all thanks to the new digital printing processes then making their entrance into the greater world of publishing. My guess is that the problems that we all know about occurred after Salt decided to build on their initial successes by expanding. Two things then happened: (1) they ran out of Anglo-American experimentalists (choose your description to fit, but you know what I mean), and (2) they had to staff the larger operation up and costs rose accordingly. To make ends meet, pay the mortgage and so forth, they went for it, and had to go into a broader market than they were in originally, so as to generate that income. Some of their author choices may have been, in retrospect, unwise, but no-one gets them right all the time. Then, they got hit by some problems with one of their printers -- memory says that said printer was taken over by a big combine which had a different attitude towards outstanding bills -- and then a collapse in the bookstore market after they had gone in for that sector in a big way. (Borders collapsed, and Waterstone's went weird -- as I understand it, the stocks of a given title there were driven by software aimed at chart CDs, and thus if a book didn't sell at the speed of, say Beyoncé, it was returned for credit within days. This is why in all but a few branches you can't find any poetry worth looking at, barring A-level course material and prize-winners. My local branch here is a glorious exception to the rule, but even they have struggled.) After all that there were only two choices: diversify, cut costs and stay in business as a publisher (which is what they seem to have done), or, go back to being a small press in the spare room.
The latter is what I do at Shearsman. I reckon I could grow this to something much bigger, at a cost, and it would not be too difficult with ACE funding of the scale that Bloodaxe and Carcanet get. Salt's sales last year, or the year before, were 3 times mine; Carcanet's were 7 or 8 times mine. The latter funds its entire office from grant aid, I think. But, it would also mean making hard decisions about I publish here, because I would definitely have to generate more sales per title than I do now. And then I'd be chasing the sales rather than the books I want to publish. Fortunately I can subsidise it by not taking money out of the press, but I don't have a sustainable business model for the "real world". I've a lot of respect for what Chris has done at Salt and there are still good books coming out there, but they're not perhaps the ones most of you on this list want to read. There IS a divide between the classic small press, where one pleases oneself, as well as, hopefully, a small devoted readership, and a business that has to generate a reasonable income. In the wake of the recent ACE funding cuts, Enitharmon dropped its entire poetry list, as did Flambard, and others have scaled back too. It's not easy out there unless you're subsidised somehow. Some Salt authors have moved elsewhere -- some of them are here in fact -- but I don't think anyone at Salt has been left without an outlet, have they? At least, not unless their previous books didn't sell at all -- and I too have a minimum level of sales that I expect to see, although it's a lot lower than Salt's threshold for the cost reasons outlined above. None of us can afford to see books disappear without trace, given the amount of effort, and cash, we put into them. Thankfully, very few Shearsman titles have tanked completely -- and I'm not going to tell you which ones have....
Tony
On 4 Jul 2011, at 13:19, Jamie McKendrick wrote:
The question of poetry and commerce seems unnecessarily fraught. The last time I made a stray remark about the question (on Jacket) Rob Stanton in a summing-up article oddly chose almost the very words I had used in clarification in a severe reprimand:
Myself: "the sales of poetry books have no significance to me as a marker of aesthetic value."
Stanton: "When has market share ever necessarily equated to any art’s aesthetic value?"
I don't mean to reawaken that Heaney 'debate' of baleful memory but just to indicate how easily misconstrued any statement on the matter can be.
Perhaps I'm doing the same but Tim, surely your remark "unless it's just about money... Yea, well...... " is at odds with your earlier sense that Salt could have pursued a more effective course by not expanding its list, and thereby losing its avant-garde profile. What I took you to be saying is that there was a better commercial strategy the editor could have pursued rather than that he should have remained aloof to such considerations altogether. In other words it might not be "just about money" while also being about money...?
At least Salt hasn't dropped most of the poets they began publishing, as far as I know (which isn't very far). The question made me think of what happened at OUP where the whole list was felled at once, ostensibly for reasons of financial loss. As I understand it, the list was paying for itself quite well. Ironically, several of the poets, such as Alice Oswald, who went elsewhere, within a few years would be earning considerable royalties for other publishing houses. But even if that had not been the case, there should still have been a serious argument about its continuance.
( Incidentally the description of Carcanet I read on Wikipedia is misleading: Wikipedia: "Oxford Poets is an imprint of the British poetry publisher Carcanet Press.The imprint was established in March 1999 when the founder and editor of Carcanet Press, Michael Schmidt, acquired the Oxford University Press poetry list." On Michael Schmidt's website - perhaps the source- it is described thus:
"In 1999-2000 Carcanet took over the Oxford University Press poetry list." "Took over" is probably better than "acquired", given that a large majority of the poets went elsewhere.)
I may be missing a great deal of the context but I don't see why an editor talking about flagging poetry sales should be seen as "shitting" on a sector of the art, or as "ranting". I suppose what I'm asking is why the matter should be so sensitive - the matter of finance not of the direction of Salt, as I can see why the latter could cause bitterness.
It goes along with the easy assumption in some quarters that the bigger publishers of poetry are merely commercial, and therefore have no commitment to the art.
Best,
Jamie
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