Possibilities for new or upcoming independent publishing houses Reading for the Cartagena Hay Festival 2014 by Luc de Rooy, publisher of Uitgeverij Karaat
introduction Good afternoon, I am a Dutch editor from a small, literary publishing house, based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and named Uitgeverij Karaat. I was invited to the 2014 Hay Festival in Cartagena for this first international Editorial Talent meeting, and I am here to tell you the story of my publishing house. It’s not the biggest publishing house and it’s not the smallest (although actually it’s still quite tiny) – it’s something in between. It’s not the biggest success story and it’s not a story about failure – Karaat is an average young company that has had its ups and downs. But we cannot complain, as, within four years after its start, Karaat has managed to become a well respected publishing house in the literary field of Belgium and the Netherlands. I will simply tell you our story, from scratch to now, and I think you can all draw a lot of parallels to your companies in
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your countries, although there are probably also some major differences. And by telling it I think I will show you my opinions on the possibilities we – upcoming independent publishing houses – have in a market that’s mainly dominated by larger, commercial players. Let’s start to say, that I, personally, am not pessimistic at all about today’s publishing industry, not about the financial crisis, not about the decrease in the number of readers, not about digital reading; I am quite critical about the last fifteen years though, but not about today’s editors in the literary field. There are still a lot of professional, book-loving, literature-loving editors on this planet. But I do think it is time to make reflections, so we won’t make big mistakes that could harm the literary business.
the start Once upon a time, there was a small editor who was working in a major publishing house. Of course, that small editor was me. Around ten years ago, I worked in a big, commercial, corporate publishing house, which name I will not mention now. This big publishing house, was (and still is) the Dutch publisher of, among others, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar and Jorge Franco. So by working there I learned the basics of publishing universal literature in general and Latin American fiction in particular.
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I don’t think I will have to tell you all why I love literature or why it is so important to continue to publish it, I am sure all of you feel the same passion, so I will continue. It had always been my dream to work in one of those big, broad, general and literary publishing houses, they were my heroes. Still, when working there, I noticed it wasn’t completely how I expected it to be. These were the years 2004, 2005, 2006. I had been a reader since my youth, reading all literary works I could put my hand on, and I knew publishing houses, especially this one, to be brave, to publish the kind of special literature I liked, to publish all kinds of writers, unknown writers, experimental writers, writers from all over the world, in nice, exclusive editions, with epilogues, prologues, special editions, works that were recommended by other writers – not yet by television hosts. Let’s go back to those years in which I started working in the publishing industry. I started at the bottom, doing all kinds of little assignments, getting to know the business while doing it. It was plain crisis – it still is – and the publishing house didn’t dare to publish high risk books anymore. All new, exciting ideas were stopped; essays, poetry, and etcetera – everything had to fit in the profit margin of the company. So my dream of getting a full time editing job there and finding the next James Joyce for them were not becoming reality. Enough, let’s not talk about one commercial publishing house in particular. But what I and a friend of mine – we, the two editors of today’s Uitgeverij Karaat – were noticing, was that a lot of books with a high literary profile,
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that just because of this didn’t fit commercial standards – essays, short novels, poetry –, weren’t bought, translated and sold anymore in The Netherlands. Or not as it used to be two or three decades before. We had the feeling that all main publishing houses were choosing ‘safe’ titles to publish (which was quite understandable, looking at the financial crisis in which Europe was), and were not daring to publish uncommon titles anymore. Publishing houses (I also worked as a lector and freelance editor for a while) had been copying each other’s successes for some years already. They had found the main reader, the profile of the books that sold best, the best way to promote these, and had been exploiting this in the larger part of the nineties and first years of the new millennium. With the profits they made in the good years, they could afford lesser selling books, like poetry, debut books, unknown foreign writers, sometimes even essays. But now, in the bad years, commercial publishers weren’t eager to publish risky books anymore, and it was obvious that the book market was becoming quite uniform. With this in mind we decided that we would focus on this market (which was also the niche we loved to work in): stories, short novels, essays, poetry. We would of course also publish regular novels, but all titles would only be bought because of their literary value. Then it was 2009, and we started Uitgeverij Karaat, publishing house Carat, Editorial Quilate.
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We would have to choose books that we would love to read, but actually weren’t being published anymore. So, our selection criteria became: first a book has to have a literary value. A badly written book doesn’t make it to our list (even if we are completely sure we would sell a huge amount of it). Then: the books need to be different from the mainstream. I consider Karaat as a small museum. All around Karaat you can find bigger museums (bigger publishers), which attract way more people, but they are all a bit alike. What do we have to do to attract more visitors? We should not copy the bigger museums by buying the same type of works, give the same tours and have the same catalogues (because the bigger museums/publisher have a huge advantage over me in means, number of workers, distributioncanals); we should show that we are something completely different than visitors have ever seen before, even if we are very small. So our books need to be ‘different’, I don’t know how to explain it better, as every book has its own way of publishing. We started with a very short novel of Alejandro Zambra, a novel which I before had praised to other publishers when I was working as lector, but most editors thought it was too short to have success in The Netherlands. We proved them wrong. Later we published also poetry from Zambra, short stories from Charles D’Ambrosio (also quite a success) and found a young Mexican writer, Valeria Luiselli, who had published two books in Spanish. We made her an offer, and I think it was because we also definitely wanted her book of essays (what other Dutch editor would want to make an unknown writer debut with a book of essays?), she chose for us. You can see we maintained our initial idea: uncommon genres, believing in them and making them our focus points.
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Let’s stop one minute at this last remark. Let me clear things up: of course there still are other publishing houses who like to publish once in a while essays, short stories or poetry, but we had the feeling that when a publishing house was actually buying one of those ‘not very commercial’ books, they didn’t spend time, energy or money on promoting these ‘difficult’ books, as apparent some marketing rule says: ‘promote the books that are already in the news, books that are not in the news are not to be mentioned, as it is impossible to promote them, the effect would be nil’. And therefore the energy and marketing budget goes to their bestsellers – and the essays or poetry get lost somewhere between all the other 250 books they publish all year long. Our idea was to completely focus our attention on this kind of books, to not let us get distracted by ‘bigger’ or ‘more commercial’ titles. And it worked. The press got enthusiastic about our idea and wrote large articles. The book stores started with a lot fear (as they don’t want to buy books that will never be sold), but with every review they bought more copies. And the number of readers grew and is still growing. Why? I think the main reason for our little success is that we try to publish books that were not being published a lot, or that were being published less and less. We wanted to reach the reader that didn’t feel like reading best sellers. I always compared it to the audience of art house movies – these visi-
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tors don’t like to see too many Hollywood movies, and are always searching for quality. They don’t mind if something is weird, different, short, difficult, intellectual or experimental. So if a publishing house makes books for this type of readers, the books can also be weird, different, short, difficult, intellectual or experimental. And five years ago there still weren’t too many publishers focusing on this group. Getting titles wasn’t that difficult. There were so many good books to be found, books that no other publisher wanted: essays, poetry, and short stories. But we decided to go only for the best. The best writers in the world, and to be exclusive: publish only four, five titles per year, so we had a lot of time to dedicate to every book. Now, four years later, we managed to get nice, steady sales that are growing with every title we publish. Booksellers see that we try to offer a type of book that isn’t it their shops yet, so they get interested, and more if the reviews are good and the readers start to buy it. I will not use superlatives to describe my publishing house, but we are actually experiencing success, growth, we receive a lot of mails of readers who congratulate us with the titles we publish, and we notice that people talk about Karaat on the internet. What I wanted to show by my short reading, that there are possibilities for small, new, upcoming, independent publishing houses, starting in a bootstrapped way, to become a serious player on the book market. We will never sell ten thousands of copies of one title (although, why not), but any
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small publisher is capable of making money, working with top class writers, designers and translators, and still publish books that are seen as ‘difficult to sell’, or ‘difficult to put in the market’, or whatever term you want to use for it. Having said this, I will not advise every publisher to choose for difficult titles. Every editor should choose the books he likes to work with. But I can say that only searching for mainstream titles, copying bestsellers or following the safe route hasn’t proved too good for many publishers during the crisis. When we started there were several bigger publishers going bankrupt, and several of them were trying to save themselves by not publishing risky titles anymore and still collapsed. My last words of this part of the reading is for everyone who wants to publish, is publishing or feels he should be publishing books: be brave. Publish the books that you like, the books that readers are searching for (and are still hard to get), the books that no-one knew they wanted to read (but you proved them wrong), the books that are worth publishing. Because if you do that, your publishing house is worth existing, how small, tiny, obscure, independent (or big, commercial and bestselling) it may be. * There are also booksellers on this meeting. I want to broaden my reading a bit to bookshops. At the moment bookshops are in hard times. Last month one of the biggest book store chains in The Netherlands went bankrupt.
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I believe my story for publishers (publishing the same type of books, searching for the safe way, not buying nor selling difficult titles) can be compared to the story of this chain of bookstores. Crisis showed up, increases fell, the books that looked hard to sell were not bought anymore, readers noticed that the book stores were getting uniform, not offering interesting titles, and the situation of the company got in a slow but vicious circle, until it wasn’t to be stopped. I want to say to some bookstores the same as I said one minute ago to the publishers: be brave. Be brave in what you buy and be brave in what you sell. Bookstores, at least the bookstores that are serious about their job, should never stick to bestsellers alone, should never sell only uniform books, only books that look safe, that only come from the larger publishers. This would mean (and I only change the word ‘publish’ for ‘sell’): Sell the books that you like, the books that readers are searching for (and are still hard to get), the books that no-one knew they wanted to read (but you proved them wrong), the books that are worth selling. Because if you do that, your bookstore is worth existing, how small, tiny, obscure, independent (or big, commercial and bestselling) it may be. End of my lecture. January 2014, Luc de Rooy
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For more questions, go ahead and ask me, or send me an e-mail on l.derooy[@]uitgeverijkaraat[.]nl More information: www.uitgeverijkaraat.nl PS. After this reading (and after those of two other small, independent publishers) there was a nice, exciting discussion between the attendants, whether or not we were making a too big gap between ‘commercial’ publishers and ‘independent’ publishers, whether or not we were making the small publishers look good and brave and the bigger ones look bad and cowardly. I wanted to write some lines extra to explain this. First of all I was asked to make a lecture on the possibilities for smaller presses. Of course you must stereotype the publishing world a bit to show what is the actual position of this presses and how they can also use this position. Positioning you as an independent player, that’s opposing commercial publishers is part of the game. Of course I see the value in a commercial player, that has a nice sum of money to buy important works, position them in the market, reach a lot of readers. They might be more important in the field than a small press, but I wanted to show big presses don’t cover the entire literary field, and between big rocks fit a lot of small rocks. And together they can form a stable surface.
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