We're moving

Exposition is moving to Wordpress, where it will become the official blog of Fifth Star Press.

The way we distribute now.

From the Poetry Foundation, Janaka Stucky on the realities of poetry publishing expressed in units.

Publishing 2100

If readers of literature are to be grateful to this clustered and chaotic age for anything, it may well be the innovation imposed upon publishers who find themselves simultaneously confined by harsh economic conditions and freed by technologies that allow them to do things for almost nothing that used to be very expensive. Here from the Guardian are four models in small press publishing, each of which are notable for how they confront the economic and technical realities of the current marketplace and each of which are notable for how they may affect what sorts of work get published.

The first, Unbound, uses a subscription method, by which readers can go to their website and pledge money toward the publishing of a book. Then in return for his or her stake the pledger receives a copy of the published book, a signed copy, an invite to the launch party, depending on the amount given. Subscription publishing is nothing new. It is, according to the article, how Samuel Johnson’s dictionary was published. And it can boast as its most attractive advantage full funding of a book before it comes to print. However, to succeed a title must generate enough buzz to meet its projected cost and thus far Unbound has mainly relied on well-known names, such as former Python Terry Jones to clear that bar. Nevertheless, at a time when survival has become the primary preoccupation of all sorts of businesses, there is something refreshing about a model that is by its very nature self-supporting.

Many American readers are already familiar with Melville House. Here the Guardian highlights the publisher's “hybrid book,” an intriguing publishing model in which readers purchase a bound book and then unleash “illuminations” by scanning a QR code. These enhancements are comprised of “an anthology of readings and illustrations that explain the cultural milieu and legacy of the particular novella.” The idea of a book coming packaged with the equivalent of DVD extras inspires a certain degree of ambivalence. While I was excited at the idea of an anthology of five classic novellas—including those by Chekov and Conrad—all titled “The Duel,” I can’t imagine wanting to read the book more knowing there will be pictures.

The third model is the British venture Boxfiction, billed as a “TV series you can read.” The less said the better. Similarly, the new Penguin Shorts go the ebook one better, not only are they digital but they’re short. “All we can do is respond to what the market wants,” says founder Venetia Butterfield. Which is certainly one way of looking at it.

Random Media Guy

One advantage of being an editor at a literary magazine was that it ended any conversation initiated by the question “So, what do you do?” with a single sentence. “Interesting” was the most representational reaction to my answer, if not the most common. “Bo-ring” was the most honest. (Yes, someone did say this to me once and I wanted to kiss her for it.) The fact was that that was what I was, and there was little more I could have said about the job that anyone asked, or cared, to hear. I have since discovered that from an employment standpoint the title of lit-mag editor is not a door-opener either, and the fact I was at it for so long only highlights my folly rather than marks me as a dependable, dedicated worker. Therefore it was probably inevitable that—while I waited for someone to glean general indispensability from my very particular resume—I would find myself cast into a variety of far flung endeavors over the year and a half.

The Launch of a Concern and a Community

 After a more than a year of meetings and preparation, we are prepared to make public a new big idea in small press publishing: Fifth Star Press, a not-for-profit book publisher of trade nonfiction and fiction with a local focus on Chicago culture and history. There would seem to be, you might say, something audacious (if not flat out nuts) about starting a publishing company during the worst economy in 70 years, at a time when the one thing people think they know about books it that they are going away. However we are entering into this enterprise with the exact opposite mindset.


We conceived of Fifth Star as an antidote to the impersonality of the Kindle and other electronic readers. We have nothing against such gadgets; however, our research has indicated that while e-readers have become the indisputable favorites of mystery, romance, and science fiction readers, the print medium remains the destination of choice for readers of non-genre fiction and nonfiction. We believe that offering the majority of people who prefer books to electronic devices the sort of book they want to read is a good business model.


Our mission is twofold: we hope to bring popular and marketable books to a broad audience and we seek to prove that a lean, sales-oriented model of publishing can prevail at a time when so many publishers are closing or scaling back their operations.


Our first books will be out in the spring. I will be saying a lot more as the publication date nears and more about how this model fits into our view of the current state of publishing in the weeks and months to come.

The Book That Coined a Conundrum

Catch-22 is 50 years old. I first read the novel when it was 17, and I haven't read a book I liked better since. If I'd known that would be the case then I might have been depressed, but the reality is that books that help to form our consciousnesses will mostly be read when are young, so it's natural rather than sad to be more attached to the adult books we read early in our teens than those we read later, regardless of merit.

Along the same lines, a critic once said of Heller, Catch-22, and his subsequent novels that any author who creates a idiom will never write a work of equal or greater importance. That always stuck to me as an odd sort of curse, since most writers, having coined the paradox of a generation, would be happy to call it a day.

From my inbox

Woke up to this today. Sort of a weekly thing. I love the first two comments. I'm not sure if they're referring to the event itself or to the post-print apocalyptic landscape.

A Platform and a Conversation

Not long ago, I attended a symposium at which Dominique Raccah, publisher of Sourcebooks, talked about some of the exciting technological advances e-readers had to forward to. (The other member of the panel was Dan Sinker, who suggested that computers are obsolete and that novels will henceforth be written on cell phones by teenage Japanese girls.) When asked which innovations she was most enthusiastic about, Raccah said that—with the new e-book technology—it would soon be possible to know at any given moment to know who was reading the same book you are. This would, she said, provide a “platform for a conversation.” As it happened, I was sitting next to a book critic. We exchanged looks of mutual horror.

It’s fair to say that words like platform and conversation have been applied figuratively these days in so many ways to virtual realms that they are completely removed their literal meanings. However, the question remains: is the opportunity for a contemporaneous conversation with other readers of the same book something that anyone has been clambering for? Or is connecting Kindle readers with each other merely the next logical technological step regardless of demand? Reading has historically been a solitary activity and, I always assumed, a self-selecting pursuit, insofar as every reader I know enjoys quiet and solitude as indispensible elements of the reading experience.

I was thinking about this the other day while reading Louis Menand in the New Yorker on the letters of T.S. Eliot. When Eliot published “Tradition and the Individual Talent”—the essay that Menand credits with creating the modern university English department—in the Egoist, the magazine boasted 185 subscribers. Despite the absence of what we now call connectivity, Eliot was somehow able to start a conversation that continues to influence the study of literature almost nine decades later. Of course, the key mechanism at work is genius, or at the very least, insight. Would a chat on Kindle among readers of The Help—the tagline for the film is “Join the conversation”—break comparable ground? It could, theoretically, but as anyone who as ever sat next to a stranger on an airplane knows conversation for conversation’s sake is not automatically a good thing.

Mistakes We Didn't Know We Were Making

I started Exposition on the day after I left my position at TriQuarterly in the spring of 2010. My intent, as the subhead suggested, was to reveal the peculiar circumstances of a literary sensibility in a new and impermanent age. The idea of documenting the unexpected turns of a life in literary publishing after leaving my relatively comfortable existence at TriQuarterly seemed worthy as a personal activity and potentially interesting to anyone who wanted to check it out. However, early on I encountered unexpected difficulties that maybe should not have been so unexpected. The first was that I realized I was far more comfortable commenting on the words and works of others than I was offering regular opinions on the shifting state of publishing, as I saw it. A second was that I came to see in short order that the necessary rapid and steady pace of a blog was disharmonious the uneven movement of a personal/career crisis/opportunity. A significant aspect of redirecting a career after thirteen years in the same job is knocking on doors—real and metaphorical—trying to sell stories, books, and oneself. Yet it’s bad form at best to discuss specific job or creative opportunities while they are pending. And so I was left toiling in quiet desperation out in the world, while devoting Exposition to stories like this, commenting on the fault lines between print and technology, a tectonics that are as limiting as they are important.

Over the past few months, though, circumstances have changed. For one thing, what seemed at first to be an unwelcome job change at an inopportune time has turned into a walk-on role in one of the great labor crises of the last century and a half. Secondly, after a year of development, I am (with a few other souls of equally questionable judgment) on the verge of launching a publishing experiment inspired by the current circumstances in Chicago and in publishing. We will be announcing the project and a new website in the next month. In the meantime, I hope provide context and a rationale for such a step, with the understanding that rationales are not always rational.

Dr. Syntax Edges Prosody by a Nose

I thought concordances and word counts were relatively time-tested scholarly techniques, new technologies notwithstanding, but the end of the story makes it worth reading.

Blogging Makes Joan Didion Uncomfortable

This is the second in installment of posts in which iconic writer of the sixties reveals misgivings toward the brave new world of writing in a technological age. In an interview—or. more accurately, a passing encounter —with Ross Kenneth Urken of the blog Guest of a Guest, Joan Didion says:

Well, I don't really understand blogging. It seems like writing, except quicker. I mean, I'm not actually looking for that instant feedback.

Just as it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Phillip Roth should have no interest in curling up in bed with a Kindle, it should shock no one that Joan Didion, whose sentences flash like knife blades honed as a keen as razors blades that somehow never go dull, should have little interest in the casual immediacy of blogging.

“It makes me uncomfortable,” Didion said. “It’s an entirely different impulse, I guess. It's like talking.”

And, of course, writing as talking is not what Didion does. Consider the opening of her essay “Marrying Absurd” from Slouching toward Bethlehem (1967):

To be married in Las Vegas, Clark County’s Nevada, a bride must swear that she is eighteen or has parental permission and a bridegroom that he is twenty-one or has parental permission. Someone must put up five dollars for the license. (Sundays and holidays, fifteen dollars.) The Clark County Courthouse issues marriage licenses at any time of the day or night except between noon and one in the afternoon, between eight and nine in the evening, and between four and five in the morning. Nothing else is required. The State of Nevada, alone among the United States, demands neither a premarital blood test nor a waiting period before or after the issuance of a marriage license.

In her dry recounting of the provisions of Clark County’s marriage ordinances regarding the issuance of marriage licenses, culminating in the listing of each of the three hours during which the courthouse is closed, Didion contrasts deadpan Nevada’s forward-looking, laissez faire marriage policy of the 1960s with its consequences, which are, at the same time, lucrative, touching, and pathetic.

Most discussions of the contrasts between literary writing and blogging generally come around to questions of impermanence and revision, the implication being that bloggers are writers whose medium requires them to forego artistry for speed. However, such a view necessary devalues the range of complex decisions and techniques acquired in hours of solitary crafting that are lost in the interest of haste. To say nothing of what is lost when permanence is lost. For example, twenty years from now the 2010s will be remembered as the infancy of what will likely be by then near-universally legal gay marriage across the country. Are there essays being written today, in Iowa and Vermont, the gay “Marrying Absurd”s of today, that will still be read two decades from now?

Philip Roth Hates Change

Reuters reporter Christine Kearney asks Philip Roth about e-readers, a device over which the author of the new novel Nemesis has likely lost little sleep. Of the larger question of technology in general, Roth says:

"The concentration, the focus, the solitude, the silence, all the things that are required for serious reading are not within people's reach anymore," he said.

Beginning with film in the 20th Century, then television, then computers, and more recently social media networks such as Facebook, the reader is now utterly distracted, he said.

"Now it is the multiple screens and there is no competing against it," Roth said. Roth does not plan to buy any kind of e-reading device such as Amazon's Kindle. "I don't see what the point is for me," he said. "I like to read in bed at night and I like to read with a book. I can't stand change anyway."

Kearney’s second topic struck me—if not Roth—as more interesting.

"Among the publishing chatter about a possible impending death of the popular, longer novel and the growth of novellas due to e-readers,” Kearney writes, "Nemesis—clocking in at about 56,000 words—is Roth's latest in a cycle of short novels."

While I’ve caught none of this chatter, Kearney suggests that Roth is on the cutting edge of the trend. “I am with the times,” Roth jokes.

Roth, author Goodbye, Columbus, says he asked Saul Bellow, author of The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog, how to write a short novel.

I talked to him and said "How do you do it?" And he didn't know any more than anybody else. So we just laughed.

Breaking: Book Publishers Believe People Need Book Publishers

In a USA Today Op–Ed this week, the authors Harold McGraw III and Phillip Ruppel present five myths about the future of book publishing the digital age. Their top two are:

Myth No. 1. Publishers are merely printers. That would be news to companies like ours, which don't even operate their own printing presses. Publishers today are in the content business. We develop it; we design it; and we deliver it however our readers want it. And while a large part of our business remains in paper and print, we are seeing an unmistakable and irreversible shift toward bits and bytes with e-books and digital delivery platforms accounting for a growing share of the total market.

Myth No. 2. Authors don't need publishers in the digital age. Anyone who has ever written a book knows this to be false. Many great authors would never have found their audience without a great publisher willing to take a risk on their talents and market their works. At every stage of the editorial process, publishers partner with their authors as creative consultants, editors and designers. Ernest Hemingway had Maxwell Perkins from Charles Scribner's Sons, and Norman Mailer had E.L. Doctorow from Dial Press.

This week I attended a seminar designed to orient out of work print journalists on opportunities for web writers and web editors (as a job distinct from that of web designer). The moderator insisted there were plenty of good-paying jobs based on the same-value added argument. Firms will hire journalists to produce web content because they have skills and training that readers value, such as fact-checking and interviewing. As encouraged as I was at the thought, I found myself wondering at the same time if this were true. My sense is that people don’t miss what they don’t notice.

For example, I am more likely to read a film review by Anthony Lane of a film that I am not going to see than I am to read a review by David Denby of a film that I am because I prefer Lane’s writing (and I rarely go to see, or avoid, films based on reviews anyway). In other words, I tend to read reviews for the writing and the quality of argument, but I suspect that I am a small minority. Anyone seeking movie reviews on the Web can go to Rotten Tomatoes and not only get reviews but rankings of box office tallies (something that I doubt either Lane or Denby much cares about), links to buy tickets, watch clips, read celebrity gossip, and countless other features and adornments—all of which I’m guessing were proposed in design meetings in which the idea of improving the quality of writing of the reviews was never raised.

The key questions become for how much longer will publishers, regardless of the format in which they are publishing, feel it is worth the expense and effort to play Perkins to Fitzgerald (or, for that matter, Lish to Carver) and how much longer will readers continue to expect such a marriage of literary and editorial skill?

Who could have predicted?

There’s an old joke about two writers talking publishing:

Writer 1: Any luck with your novel?

Writer 2: Naw, the publishing market sucks. I can’t believe how much it sucks.

Writer 1: It’s always sucked.

Writer 2: Yeah, but now it’s really bad.

For as long as I can remember people have been saying that conditions for getting a first novel published by a New York house were bad and getting worse by the second. These expressions of doom pre-dated the Kindle. Just the same, this story should surprise no one. Facing declining sales and under pressure from parent companies and shareholders, publishing houses seem to be taking fewer risks on new talent than ever before. And e-reader consumers thus far overwhelmingly favor non-fiction, genre fiction, bestsellers in general. In other words, they are inclined to buy that which is the opposite of the first literary novel of a recent graduate of a MFA program.

The trend in literary publishing, regardless of format, from at least as far back as Oprah’s first book club, has been away from the blue-chip competence of MFA grads toward writer-personalities who can tell a story of their lives on Oprah’s couch that tracks directly with the material in the book. The message being: you, too, can commodify your sucky life. With the result being an unexpected, disproportionate fame and, now, with the logical conclusion being—this.

Updated: Links fixed.

Where do they find these people?

I have always wondered where lifestyle reporters find interview subjects who conveniently suffer from the exact angst du jour highlighted the article. In this case the story is that there are couples in America in which one prefers to read paper books and the other prefers to read e-books. (See the couple above captured spontaneously in their living room reading on differing devices.) She loves the way books smell; he thinks books are so Middle Ages and hates the whole “smell” thing.

The writer concedes that it’s not clear how widespread this quiet agony of marriages strained to the breaking point by divergent preferences of reading platforms is but insists that “the publishing industry is paying close attention, trying to figure out how to market books to households that read in different ways.”

Apparently, there is also some concern among digital evangelists about the resiliency of paper:

“There is much more emotional attachment to the paper book than there is to the CD or the DVD,” said Mike Shatzkin, founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which advises book publishers on digital change. “It is not logical — it’s visceral.”

Right? Because there’s no logic to people preferring the device that you can pick up and read after you’ve dropped it off the Empire State Building.

What almost every article that sets out to reveal the tension between e-readers and paper readers is the notion that there necessarily must be a philosophical motivation behind the choice, deeply rooted in each individuals world view and sense of self, but my sense is that such motivations are often more prosaic. I’m not an early adopter of e-reading technology for several reasons. One is that I can’t afford to spend hundreds of dollars on technology that will cost half as much a year from now and be obsolete in two. Another is that I know if I bought one, I’d never use it and then feel guilty. I reason I don’t use the iCal app on my computer isn’t that I like the smell of the half dozen to-do lists strewn about by desk. I don’t use it because I know that if I did, one item on my hand-scrawled to-do lists would be “Transfer to-do lists to iCal.”

The Souffle Also Rises

With Gourmet first coming back digital and now in a newsstand print format, Conde Nast appears to be the first of the big magazine publishers to be following the trend I pointed out in Creative Nonfiction of online literary magazines who establish a print presence by publishing greatest hits collections semi-regularly. Jason Fell, the author of the article, suggests that this move is not an indication that Nast is bringing back Gourmet as a periodical but uses the opportunity scratch his head, as many have, over the closing Gourmet in the first place, a panic move ostensibly aimed at bottom line realities that caused disproportionate damage to the company’s public image.

I hope to be back on a more regular posting schedule after Labor Day. The languid steamy days of August have coincided with a period of intensified job hunting, which these days goes mostly Choose File/Attach Resume and “I believe my education and experience make me uniquely qualified for this position,” which means “I can’t tell from the language in your posting what your company actually publishes, but if it doesn’t advocate the killing of puppies, I’d be willing to consider it.”

Shivani on the Future of Literary Magazines

Last week, Anis Shivani posted a list on the Huffington Post of “17 Literary Journals That Might Survive the Internet.” I found the list intriguingly random. While most literary magazines these days make their case for survivability on the grounds of how well they have adapted to the new technology (as Jeanne Leiby of the Southern Review does here effectively), the magazines Shivani has chosen fall in a broad range along the spectrum of new-media adoption—which of course may be the point he is implicitly making: that editors, not circumstances, determine a magazine’s future.

Shivani asked the editors of these publications “Can this venerable American literary institution survive—or even thrive—despite new technologies?” What struck me about the replies was that many of editors make the case for their futures by referencing the nature and position of little magazine in the past. Dan Latimer of the Southern Humanities Review says, “It is astonishing to learn that the journals that spread Modernism over the globe rarely had a circulation over 1,000. The Dial was an exception.” (The Dial was an exception, though the larger it grew, the more money it lost.) Which indicates that the reach and influence of literary magazines always extended beyond their circulation numbers. How many people have read “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” in the near century since Ezra Pound urged Harriet Monroe to accept the work of an unpublished T. S. Eliot?

Robert Boyers of Salamagundi points out that literary magazines “thrive because we are committed to publishing work that cannot appear in The Atlantic or The New Yorker, work that will often seem far too eccentric and rigorous for online publications.” Which, of course, has been the mission—as advanced in different ways— of little magazines over the last century. Poets and fiction writers from Robert Frost and Marianne Moore to Joyce Oates and Ernest Hemingway were published first in small-circulation literary magazines before their work was accepted as part of the canon of the twentieth century.

Though academic quarterlies followed close on their heels, the pioneering magazines of the nineteen-teens and twenties were characterized, for the most part, by the fact that they were independently financed and that their editors rarely spent much time thinking about what they could do to bring in more subscribers. However, gone—sadly—are the days when an editor can move her operation to Europe to take advantage of a low cost of living, liquor, and printing. And most institutionally-affiliated magazines must show some growth in circulation or risk being shut down or forced online.

Carolyn Kuebler of the New England Review speculates that “eventually print will be reserved only for things that are best suited to its particular charms—literary magazines among them—rather than the assumed medium of choice.” And perhaps that will be the salvation of the literary magazine in the end: not only that it attracts a certain type of audience, but that it repels that which seeks the commercial or the profitable.

Update: I chose the Raritan image from the post because it's a great magazine that more people should know about.

The Profit Equation

The final lecture of So You Want to Start a Magazine was devoted to the steps necessary to determine a magazine’s potential for profitability. As I have suggested, the utility of the class for me was diminished by the fact that my neo-socialist literary magazine—despite all its certain dash and drive—is unlikely to be supported by Lexus, Tag Heuer, and Ketel One ads. And when I told “Steve” the instructor (who had graciously agreed to take phone calls) that my four-year subscription goals were 2000 copies, I could tell from the descending lilt in his voice that he agreed. Though I should say that Steve is not only very successful in the field but also a truly supportive instructor. Ultimately, the class was valuable for the insight it provided into the practical realities and processes that must attend the impulse to start a magazine (profitable or otherwise) and for the business plan template that was essentially the superstructure of the lesson plan. And, on the upside, I have spared myself a fortune in market-testing and branding consulting fees.

The only downside to the experience was that it revivified my long-dormant school-related anxiety and its attendant dreams. I had one the second week of class that I had returned to my alma mater the University of Wisconsin to attend a reunion of the cast of the Rodney Dangerfield vehicle Back to School that was filmed in Madison while I was going there. The dream-event was held in a crowded lecture hall and had been going on for less than a minute before I remembered not only that I had hated the movie and been annoyed at having to walk around all the cameras and crowds as I went about my self-important way, but also that I was missing a math class I had registered for but hadn’t gone to since the first week. A school anxiety dream within a school anxiety dream, and all this while I was actually doing the online work for the class as it was assigned—unlike some virtual students I could name.

Colorado Review in the HuffPo

Anis Shivani has a great interview with Stephanie G'Schwind on Huffington Post. The Colorado Review, along with other stateonymic literary magazines, like the Missouri Review and the Alaska Quarterly Review, are excellent examples of journals with regional-sounding names that are actually the equal of any of the top geographically-ambiguously-titled counterparts.

Mumbai-based author Murzban F. Shroff , who’s story “A Matter of Misfortune” appeared in TriQuarterly 132, is facing obscenity charges in Indian for his outstanding collection Breathless in Bombay (St. Martin’s, 2008).

Read all about it here.

http://www.indiawest.com/readmore.aspx?id=1700&sid=1

In a recent email Shroff wrote to us: “Several writer-friends in the U.S., are taking this forward, at various levels. If you have any contacts with writers' guilds, networks, and organizations, please bring this to their attention. I would like to add that I am immensely grateful to International Pen who came in solidly and unconditionally to ensure that the literature of my city stays protected.”

One sure way to help would be to buy his book.