Wayne Miller - Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century

2016, Selection, Arrangement, and Introduction by Travis Kurowski, Wayne Miller, and Kevin Prufer. Individual contributions are protected by copyright and gratefully reprinted with permission.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415. (800) 520-6455 www.milkweed.org

Published 2016 by Milkweed Editions

Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker

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First Edition

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Miller, Wayne, 1976- editor. | Prufer, Kevin, editor. | Kurowski, Travis, editor.

Title: Literary publishing in the twenty-first century / edited by Wayne Miller, Kevin Prufer & Travis Kurowski.

Description: First edition. | Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015033778 | ISBN 9781571319227 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Literature publishing--United States--History--21st century. | Authorship--History--21st century. | Authors and publishers--United States--History--21st century. | BISAC: LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays.

Classification: LCC Z480.L58 L58 2016 DDC 070.50973/0905--dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015033778

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Table of Contents

CONTENTS

A t the turn of the millennium, back when only one in three American adults reported using email at home, the editors of this volume were just beginning careers in literary publishing. Kevin Prufer and his colleague R. M. Kinder were publishing some of the earliest issues of Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing. Wayne Miller was a graduate student starting to edit poetry for the literary journal Gulf Coast, while Travis Kurowski was still an undergraduate, about to join the staff of West Wind Review as a fiction reader. By that point, all three of us had heard a range of voices deriding the big-box bookstores that had popped up more or less everywhere throughout the previous decade. Fence and McSweeneys had just launched in 1998, changing the look and feel of American literary magazines about as much as The Paris Review did when it first appeared in 1953. Lightning Source, an early print-on-demand publisher, had been established in 1997 but had yet to alter in any significant way how presses would cut costs and keep books in print, as well as how individual authors might self-publish. A few pioneering online literary magazines were gaining readershipCortland Review, Jacket, and La Petite Zine among themand desktop publishing was in something of a second generation: Quark had unseated PageMaker as the dominant software, but InDesignreleased in 1999had yet to make a splash.

In 2000, Nielsens BookScan was instituted, turning each author, no matter how big or small, into a data set of his/her book sales. That same year, Stephen King published online his novella Riding the Bulletthe first high-profile e-bookand books as diverse as Mark Z. Danielewskis House of Leaves, Susan Sontags In America, David Sedariss Me Talk Pretty One Day, Kazuo Ishiguros When We Were Orphans, Joseph Brodskys Collected Poems, and J. K. Rowlings Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire garnered large-scale interest. According to a 2000 article by MH Munroe, in 199899 there had been sixty publishing mergers and acquisitions with more than $20 billion spent in the process. Meanwhile, by 2000 a marked increase in the number of literary agents and agencies had cemented the agents role as both gatekeeper and medium between a growing number of aspiring authors and an increasingly hierarchical publishing structure. The 2000 Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in Kansas City was attended by just fifteen hundred peopleabout 10 percent of the number of attendees in 2015and the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) established for the first time an online presence. In four years, Foetry.com would begin to investigate perceived corruption in poetry book contestswhich by 2000 had already become the primary way that first collections were acquiredand in just three years lending libraries would start to offer to the general public e-books of popular fiction and nonfiction.

Its clear, now, that many of the seeds of our current publishing moment had already been sowed by the turn of the millennium. Print-on-demand, e-books, online publications and marketing strategies, long-term digital tracking of sales, corporate mergers, box stores, blockbuster young-adult fiction, graphic novels, powerful agents, and organizations such as AWP were already well in the mix and growing. It would nonetheless take more than a decade for these new technologies, methods, and means to change irrevocablyand to continue to changethe publishing environment today.

In 2011, just before we started work on this volume, Amazoncurrently Americas largest bookseller and the elephant in the room for so many discussions about literary publishingmade two enormous announcements. In May, the online retailer reported that its sales of e-books had surpassed those of regular books. Just a few weeks later, the company revealed it had hired Laurence Kirshbaumformer CEO of the Time Warner Book Groupto head its own book-publishing venture, effectively joining under one corporate roof roles previously reserved for publishers, editors, distributors, and retail stores.

At that particular moment, Amazon seemed steadily ascendant. In September of that year the big-box bookstore Bordersone of Amazons two largest competitorsclosed the last of its more than five hundred retail outlets after declaring bankruptcy. For the previous decade, the number of independent bookstores had been declining precipitously, having been put out of business at least in part by the expansion of box stores and online vendors such as Amazon. Between 2000 and 2007, approximately one thousand independent bookstores closed in the United States.