A Publishers Epitaph

A Saturday Rant 3/27/04

What do you publish? Do you publish crap? Why should trees be killed to make
your books? Can you justify your list in terms of what you contribute to the
culture as a whole?

We get so caught up on chat groups with the so-called "future of the
book," the problems of distribution, the difficulties of getting media
attention, and the ever-present lament of us little folks against the huge,
mean, conglomerates…the "them."

In the long term, none of this is important. It won’t matter a hundred years
from now. On the path we are headed, nobody is going to remember your
publishing company from the tens of thousands that have come before you and
the hundreds of thousands that will come after.

We small publishers are not important to the economy or even the industry.
But we are terribly essential to our society. We hold a scared trust. It is
left to us to preserve what is left of intelligent, literate culture. And I
fear that most of us fail miserably in fulfilling this role. We rationalize
our lists, made up of pap commercial entries, with the argument that we need
to survive, we need to profit, we need to feed our families.

Many people say I’m nuts or that I’m a fool. I’m not nuts. Nor am I’m a
fool. And neither am I an idealist. I don’t purport to insult your
intelligence by making an argument that we all should abandon our
commercially successful titles in order to bring forth upon our age new
thought, new literature, and new ideals.

But so many of us only see our role in terms of commercial success. What do
Poynter, Kramer, Nathan, et. al. teach us? A simple lesson: the market is
king. Find the market and publish the book. If someone is willing to pay for
it, then it must be worthwhile doing. And we do; you and I both.

And how do we do it? Most often it is by reducing our list so to be
understood by a reader with the intellectual capacity of a rubber plant. We
do it by resurrecting book-corpses, adding a new angle, a new cover, and
perpetrating fraud on what is left of the reading population by telling them
that this "new and improved" book is what will set them free, when in truth,
all it does is set them back.

"F— you, Canton, it’s not my f—ing job to preserve the f—ing culture.
I’m a single mother with kids to feed and send to college. If you want to be
a university press, then go ahead, but get off my f—ing case, asshole."
Yeah, yeah, I hear you.

But ask not why, when you stroll through your local book emporium, you see
packed shelves of diet books, dumps of trash fiction, stacks of bogus
self-help garbage, another ten new books on horseback riding, a new shelf of
celebrity cookbooks, yet another fifteen get-rich business books, twenty C
programming tomes, and enough insipid children’s books to gag a goat. You
know why.

I cry for my beloved reading public because we serve them so poorly. No, I
don’t expect Time-Warner to understand. And I don’t expect Random House to
have a clue. And H-C is beyond the pale. These are publishers run by
illiterate, ignorant bean-counters, most of whom could not spell "CAT" if
you spotted them the C and the T.

I cry because we mid-size publishers, far more often than not, abandon the
responsibility of publishing a book that might be ahead of its time; an
author with a controversial message, with a special style, who has a story
that has not been told twenty times before.

We hold ourselves up as paragons of virtue against the bean-counter
corporate publishing giants. Yet so many of us don’t have the courage, the
imagination, the fortitude, the strength, the foresight, the spirit and the
will to publish that one book that in our heart of hearts we know should be
published.

What are the books that changed your life? What have you read in your life
that your remember? Would any of you publish an "On The Road," a "Zen And
The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," a "Catcher In The Rye," a "Future
Shock," a "Greening of America," a "Prophet," a "Whole Earth Catalog,", an
"Idiots Guide to Keeping Your Volkswagen Alive," a "Catch 22," a "Road Less
Traveled," an "Old Man and the Sea," a "Waste Makers," a "History of the
English Speaking People," a "Howl," and on and on and on?

These books and others you can think of (the likes of which are not on your
list…or mine,) are the books that define our culture, that serve as a
template for recognizing our generation, that are what future generations
will point to as being the signposts of our level of civilization.

So I ask again. Would we publish such books? No we wouldn’t. In our
relentless pursuit of economic survival we small publishers emulate our
big-city cousins and in doing so have abandoned the one ideal, the one
concept that will insure our continuation: Imagination.

We are all in this together. We all have crap on our lists…and it is
probably the crap that is providing the bulk of our income. We ask not what
is good. We ask not what is important. We ask not what should be sold. We
simply ask…what will sell?

This is to be expected from the bean-counters. And it has been easy for us
to fall into their mindset. They are big and we are small. We want to be
big. So if we do what they do, we too will be big.

"Canton, I am so sick of you. All you do is criticize. All you are is a
cynic. I don’t want to listen to you. I’d rather hear from Dan Poynter or
Jan Nathan or Pat Bell because they make me feel good. F— off and die.
Take your goddamn rant and post it to a morticians list." Yeah, yeah, I hear
you.

But….what if we all walked in, sang a few bars of Alice’s Restaurant, and
walked out? What if we decided to produce a Shindler’s List? What if we
published a "Hard To Be Hip Over Forty?"

Imagination.

That is the key. Imagination coupled with commitment is what is necessary.

Imagination, commitment, and the courage to take a little risk, is what will
make us noteworthy. If you don’t understand this, than go stand over there
with your friends in New York.

I publish some highly successful bullshit books; probably more full of crap
than anything on your list. And I sell some of them for $99 dollars. As the
piano man said, "they put bread in my jar." But I’m ashamed. I have not kept
the covenant. I’m a keeper of the culture and I have not looked after it too
well.

And neither have most of you. "Yeah, it’s you I’m talking to, asshole" as my
‘philosopher in residence’ NYPD Blue’s Andy Sipowitz would say.

Here is my pitch; my challenge; my point for this week’s Rant.

Once a year, take a few dollars and put it into a book that can bring you
greatness. Once a year publish something that is so good, so different, so
unique, so enlightening, so worthwhile, so terrific, that you know the great
majority of the great unwashed will ignore. And then promote the hell out of
it. Publish something that is literate. Create one book a year that you can
point to as being the hallmark of your creative talent. Be it fiction,
non-fiction, poetry, or graphic arts, do something bold.

Publish something great; really great; something you are really proud of;
something that is a real addition to the culture. Then tell America, "Look
here, you idiots. This is better than Sienfeld. This is more worthwhile of
your time than X Files. This is of greater potential than Snoop Doggy-Dog."

Be angry with where you are professionally. "No" is not an acceptable
answer. Just do it. Think different. Seize the day. Don’t you see? This is
our time. This is our chance. We won’t be back this way again. You won’t get
a second chance to do what you should have done in the first place. You have
the power. You have the ability. You can do this. You should do this. It’s
important. Otherwise, on your dying day your final lament will be "If
only…."

If we publishers continue on the literary path we have been traveling, then
I despair at what our epitaph will be:

"They aspired for mediocrity…and achieved it."

Alan N. Canton
Adams-Blake Company, Inc.
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[Copyright 2004 by Alan N. Canton. This material may NOT re-published on any Internet listserv or Usenet newsgroup or in any print or electronic media without prior permission by the copyright holder.]