Heading off to the fundraising party for OR Books and Mischief & Mayhem… I know I’ve been enigmatic about this particular venture and my involvement with it, but I promise to make up for it when there’s something more substantial to say. I was asked to talk about why a writer would choose to place their book with us as opposed to a mainstream publisher. Being a little neurotic, I shaved my head, trimmed my pubes (hey, the clipper was already out, and that fresh feeling shows in the face, even if no one can figure out what’s causing it) and went ahead and wrote down what I was going to say. And so anyway, yeah, I thought I’d share it with whoever the hell’s reading this, since, you know, that’s what a blog is for…

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I’ve been asked to say a few words about why a writer, established or otherwise, would publish with OR/Mischief & Mayhem over a mainstream publisher.

To answer that question, we first have to talk about what makes OR and Mischief & Mayhem different from mainstream publishing.

Mischief & Mayhem isn’t trying to turn midlist writers into bestsellers. We’re trying to help midlist writers make a living at what they do, while still making an impact on the world of letters.

We don’t believe literature is measured by copies of books sold. It’s measured by quality, diversity, influence. As Virginia Woolf showed, a novel that sells only 2,000 copies can, over time, change the way fiction is read and written.

Most of the writers here tonight sell five or ten times that amount. We’re contributing to the world of literature in a variety of ways, and we have the reviews, awards, and peer recognition to show for it. By Woolf’s terms, we’ve even got the numbers.

But we’re not making a living at it. And, if you talk to a mainstream publisher, the thousands of books we sell are barely worth the effort of printing.

It’s not that the money isn’t there. It’s that the money gets eaten up by middlemen—by distributors and booksellers at the retail end, and, at the production end, by byzantine corporate bureaucracies whose ineffeciency and profligacy is summed up in a single term: “the publishers lunch.”

Of course we all have a soft spot in our heart for our local bookstore. But the fact is, 80% of books are now sold through Barnes & Noble and Amazon. Far from being an integrated part of local bookreading communities, their monopoly power enables them to dictate pricing, marketing, even content—not just the books publishers sell, but the books they buy.

These policies, and publishers’ acquiescence to them, have had a destructive effect on contemporary literature. More and more, books that aren’t considered commercial aren’t being picked up by publishers, which means readers don’t even get a chance to decide whether they want to buy them.

Of course, a certain number of midlist writers do get published each year. But after the distributor takes its 15-25% cut for placing the book in the bookstore’s warehouse, and the retailer takes its 50% cut of the sale price—which has often been discounted by as much as 20%—there’s almost nothing left to pay the army of editors, editorial assistants, designers, design assistants, publicists, publicity assistants—not to mention all those waiters—who work for the typical publishing company, let alone the writer.

So the question isn’t: why would a writer want to come to Mischief & Mayhem? It’s: why would a writer want to stay with mainstream publishing?

Don’t get us wrong. We wouldn’t ask you to invest in OR simply because mainstream publishing isn’t working. The fact is, alternative publishing models can and do work. Indeed, they’re part of a grand tradition. To mention Virginia Woolf again: she and husband Leonard founded Hogarth Press, which published not only their books, but other major work, including the first edition of “The Waste Land” and the complete works of Sigmund Freud. And, speaking of T.S. Eliot: he partnered with Geoffrey Faber to turn what had been a tiny scientific press into the foremost venue for avant-garde poetry in the English-speaking world, publishing himself, Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore, among others.

If we jump forward the present, we see that independent presses are still having an impact, whether it’s New Directions, Dalkey Archive, Soft Skull, or McSweeney’s. Major writers have started their careers at these kinds of houses—Barbara Epler brought the English-speaking world W.G. Sebald in the 90s, and then Roberto Bolaño in the noughties—and others have had their careers saved. I’m reading David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress right now. Widely regarded as a modern classic, the novel was published by Dalkey after being rejected by 54 other publishing houses.

With our partnership with OR Books, Mischief & Mayhem hopes to push the possibilities of the independent press to a new level. By eliminating bookstores and distributors, bloated bureaucracies and the huge costs of printing thousands of books at a time, only to scatter them across a nationwide network of anonymous bookstores like individual grass seeds sprinkled on Central Park’s Great Lawn, we’ve freed up thousands of dollars to spend on bringing a book to its audience, and still pay the writer a royalty that would cause a traditional publisher to laugh you out of his office, if he didn’t have a heart attack first.

We plan to publish the kinds of books that mainstream publishers can’t or won’t. Not books that don’t sell, but books that mainstream publishers won’t sell—books that, because of their form, content or their author’s track record, are deemed not to have an audience. An audience is pretty hard to find if you wait for it to come to you. But with OR’s unique production and marketing strategies, Mischief and Mayhem will be able to bring our books directly to readers, at a lower price than traditional publishers, and still pay the author a royalty between 40 and 50 percent, and make a profit to boot.

Over the past several weeks we’ve had the opportunity to see that strategy put to great effect with Going Rouge. With your support, we can do the same thing over the next several years.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 12:46 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.