MAKING BOOKS

...Distribution can be tough for the small publisher...

...When that happens, we may see a scramble to imitate them, and a return to quality...

...By The New York Times's count, 10 per cent of the titles on its best-seller lists come from small presses...

...Too expensive...

...In a recent New York Times article on black writers, Mel Watkins spoke of blacks who have turned to small presses as a way of bypassing the indifference of the major publishers which, says black writer-publisher Ishmael Reed, "aren't interested in black themes or pereeptions...

...A compendium of tips for where to find out how to do whatever it was you wanted to do, the catalog filled a need for the late 1960s—a need to escape the corporate producers, merchan-disers, and media...

...That is true...

...But it can also be argued that many small presses are just like the big ones, only smaller: that they publish the same kinds of books, with the same motive (profit), and, given the breaks, would evolve into corporate publishers themselves...

...But a contemporary pioneer in this area was, once again, Stewart Brand, who distributed The Last Whole Earth Catalog in 1971 through Random House...

...by Richard Nelson Bolles, has passed the million mark and ap-pears regularly on The New York Times best-seller list...

...Brand, who recently distributed The Next Whole Earth Catalog through Random House, thinks this arrangement works well for both small and large publishers...

...COEVOLUTION QUARTERLY What she says about women applies to many small publishers, people for whom the business world is alien and perhaps not quite savory...

...B. Dalton bookstores picked up a thoughtful vegetarian cookbook, Laurel's Kitchen, published by a Bay Area ashram, and turned a local venture into a national success...

...The practice is not new: Swallow Press put out books under a Joint imprint with William Morrow & Company back in the 1940s...

...What distributor wants to handle three-copy Orders...

...Black novelist Toni Morrison, an editor at Random House, told Watkins, "Small publishers are Publishing quality, elegant books...

...Random House), Rush said, "I am awe-struck at the imperviousness of closed economic power and find this very dis-couraging, if not downright defeating...

...some of the titles seil more than a million copies...

...Alongside distribution, a second major problem confronted by the small publisher is lack of capital to expand...

...While the major New York publishers like Random House have sold out to conglomerates, a new generation of independent publishers has been growing up, chiefly on the West Coast and particu-larly around the San Francisco Bay...

...One way for a small publisher to get around that is to team up with a big publisher...

...We carted some around to stores," he wrote later, "who didn't want them, not even on con-signment (Too big...

...If sales rise, the small publisher can expand production quickly to meet demand...

...Not all small presses are Willing to seil their titles outright to large publishers...

...Bookstores' receptiveness to small presses varies from region to region...

...Writing about the resigna-tions for The Village Voice, Barbara Baracks concluded, "Maybe they should put out a primer on power...

...After five printings of 10,000 copies, he sold the book to Harper and Row, which had earlier rejected it...

...For specialized presses—feminist publishers, for example—independent bookstores may be the best market...

...Carol Polsgrove is an associate editor of The Progressive...

...Freeman in San Francisco, to start his own Company in the South Bay...

...Small presses (responding to a need New York publishers were slow to recognize) told them how...

...But Brand recalls, in his own his-tory of the era, "Of all the press notices we eventually got, from Time to Vogue to Hot-cha...

...if they still bought cars, at least they wanted to fix them in the backyard...

...Women in general have so little access to large sums of money...

...Without substantial money Coming into the business," says Anne Kent Rush, who started Moon Books in the East Bay, "it is not possible to keep going...

...The current small-press movement—for it is something of the sort, complete with its own Conferences, directories, magazines— owes much to developments in printing technology over the last ten or fifteen years...

...He teils authors with unusual books to publish and distrib-' ute locally, prove an audience is there, then crythe big time...

...People, some of them any way, began wanting to make, too, rather than only con-sume, to do for themselves instead of going to experts...

...Raymond Barrio did just that...

...Ten Speed Press is one of hundreds of small presses which have taken advantage of new technologies and new reader inter-ests to survive, even thrive, on an encourag-ing scale...

...He had an author, a manu-script, and $4,000—scarcely a promising start at a time when Publishing was becoming Big Corporate Business...

...you ran it off on a mimeograph machine and handed it out on street corners...

...The giant New York publishers were themselves once small, independent Operations...

...The corporate distribution system is set up for volume: thousands of copies going out to thousands of bookstores...

...As you grow, your capital needs grow," says William Kaufmann, who left a job as editor-in-chief and president of a large Publishing Company, W.H...

...Small-press magnate Stewart Brand (the Whole Earth Catalogs) says big corporate advances to authors put 'all the risk on the Publishing house and none on the creative person.' However unsuccessful the attempts to reshape the process of Publishing, at least the produets of presses like Persephone, with its focus on lesbian feminist books, off er alternatives not otherwise available...

...The success of the Catalog sent out rip-ples...

...Then, at the urging of the author, Rita Mae Brown, Daughters did seil mass paperback rights to Bantam, but retained rights to the more expensive trade paperback edition...

...In Nina Winter's Interview with the Muse: Remark-able Women Speak on Creativity and Power (published by Moon Books, distributed by...

...Brand barely remembers what happened to the first copies...

...Unprepared for such rapid expansion, Bookpeople lost money, but eventually caught up with its own success...

...Sales were minimal—until he discovered the book's audience: College instructors and students...

...But chains can prove a blessing to small presses...

...There are small presses like that...

...But the Catalog, first a periodical and then a book, caught on...

...Brand and his colleagues put together the first Whole Earth Catalog in 1968 in a garage equipped with an IBM typesetting Computer...

...At another feminist Company, Per-sephone Press in Watertown, Massachusetts, the policy is not to seil rights at all— and paperback houses do approach Persephone, even though the best-selling book on its list, The Wanderground, uto-pian fiction by Sally Gearhart, has sold only a modest 25,000 copies...

...Somewhere along the way, they will become the 'in' books, and they 11 Start sell-ing...

...Heavily and astutely marketed with full-page news-paper ads, cooperatively financed with bookstore chains, Ringer's Stratford Press of Beverly Hills has amazed Manhattan publishers, aecording to The Wall Street Journal, which quoted one editor marvel-ing: "Two books from a small West Coast publisher on The New York Times best-seller list at the same time, it's just remark-able...

...Ac-cording to Terry Nemeth of Bookpeople, bookstores on the West Coast are quicker to accept variety...

...His biggest success, What Color Is Your Parachute...

...In the days ofthe Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, if you had something to say you didn't send it off to New York...

...But there is something different about today's small presses: their potential for big sales...

...Ironically, small presses as often as not use the new high technology to deliver a low-technology message...

...The chains simply may want more copies at once than the press can afford to produce—and then may want to return them when they don't seil...

...Because of the introduction and refinement of offset printing, phototypesetting...

...But the fact that small time can beat the big time at its own sleazy game does not outweigh the more valuable contribution of small presses: They do sometimes meet needs left unmet by the corporate giants...

...What is it...

...Unlike Shopping mall bookstores, which carry many copies of a few books, independents cater to readers that go beyond best sellers and, in addition, will special-order books forcustomers...

...Daughters Press in Houston, Texas, turned down offers from paperback houses which wanted RubyfruitJungle until the novel had sold about 50,000 copies under the Daughters imprint...

...in Germany—to the big article in Es-quire, nothing had the business impact of one tiny mention in 'Uncle Ben Sez' in the Detroit Free Press, where some reader asked, 'How do we start a farm?' and Uncle Ben printed our address...

...Off spring of the 1960s, today's small presses grew out of a time of nose-thumbing at the corporate establishment...

...Pat McGloin, President of the Company, says Persephone does not seil rights because "we feel that we're trying to establish an independent feminist community network, and to work for the success of a book and then seil it would only be to our detriment...

...One of the first small-press successes, and a suitable symbol of the movement, was the series of Whole Earth Catalogs published by Stewart Brand from various points around the San Francisco Bay...

...They deserve applause on their own terms, because they speak to neglected audiences—and because they prove there are cracks in the corporate economy...

...And because of our training to be impractical and fearful with money and to think small, when we get it, we often fail to use it to make us more effec-tive...

...Efforts to create Organization truly different from the hierarchical worlds of corporate publishers have en-countered rough waters...

...A small Berkeley distributor called Bookpeople agreed to distribute the Catalog, and as its fortunes took off, so did Bookpeople's...

...The new presses have a solid tradition behind them...

...Rebellion had set in—rebellion against, first, the Vietnam war, then against the corporate economy that fed on such wars...

...and microcomputers, a publisher can have a page set for a fraction of the old linotype cost and break even on a run of 500 copies, inexpensively priced...

...One West Coast publisher, Robert J. Ringer, has made millions on a book called Crisis Investing, the best-selling non-fiction hard-cover book last year, and on a sex guide by a Hollywood psychologist, Nice Girls Do—and Now You Can Too...

...In an industry dominated by giants," noted Times reporter Edwin McDowell in a recent arti-cle, "small book publishers are having a bigger impact than ever...

...It need only cost a few thousand dollars to get started, but if a book begins selling well, the small press may have trouble Coming up with enough cash for new printings to meet the demand...

...But small presses need not be judged aecording to their impact on big ones...

...And throughout the Twentieth Century, there has been a string of small, non-commercial presses specializ-ing in fine literature—presses like those that published Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce in Paris, or Leonard and Virginia Woolfs Hogarth Press in England, or the Swallow Press in the United States...

...A decade later, books from his Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, California, seil in the hundreds of thousands...

...The hefty advances which publishers pay to authors these days, he says, make corporate Publishing an erratic business: "It puts all of the risk on the publishing house and none on the creative person...

...bookstores on the East Coast, home of the established press, are less likely to deviate from their famili?r habit of ordering from big New York publishers...

...Women are not giving up, though...

...Today, it is not at all uncommon for a small press to seil either distribution or mass paperback rights to a large publisher...

...Therein lay the appeal of the Catalog and other small-press books, like Ten Speed's first, Anybody's Bike Book—they told readers how to do things on their own...

...It would be fine indeed, not only for good writers but for all of us, if small presses were to lead the way back to quality in corporate Publishing, now lost in a Hollywood maze of entertainment as produet...

...Over a nine-month period, Bookpeople's accounts exploded from 600 to 3,000...

...For small presses, selling to chain bookstores may be out of the question...

...It was a quick step to rebelling against con-sumption of the corporate economy's products...

...In 1971, its employes bought it from the found-ers and turned it into one of the staunchest Supports for a distribution system— essential to the survival of small presses...

...They wanted to build their own houses, raise their own food...

...Many women now have taken on the task of raising huge capital and educat-ing themselves about how to sueeeed in their own businesses...

...Even if the press distributes its own books—and microcomputers have made that easier to do—what bookstore wants to order a couple of copies of a book that may sit on the shelf for six months waiting for a reader...

...Reviews by the media did, of course, have a great deal to do with the Catalog's success...

...He published his novel, The Plum Plum Pickers, about Chicano farm workers, under his own Ventura Press imprint and began distributing it out of the South Bay...

...He and his wife pooled their savings with funds from other shareholders to start William Kaufmann, Inc., which now has a long list of titles ranging from The California Water Atlas, a model for re-source assessment, to Kaufmann's bestseller (more than 150,000 copies), The Universal Traveler: A Soft-Systems Guide to Creativity, Problem-Solving and the Process ofReaching Goals...

...More than half the staff of the noted Feminist Press in New York resigned last fall after a battle to keep decision-making collective and pay equal for everyone...