An independent viewpoint

A couple of months ago, Akashic Books publisher Johnny Temple wrote a very thoughtful piece for Poets & Writers about what authors can do with book promotion and how independents can serve them just as well — if not better — than the big conglomerates. It’s reprinted with permission by alternet.org and is certainly worth a read:

Calling upon writers to do more of their own promotional “dirty

work” is by no means a suggestion that they alone must carry this

burden. To be sure, it is primarily the publishers’ job to market the

books they take on. But in Theroux’s “age of intrusion,” it is unwise

for any author to hand over the reins of her career to someone she

doesn’t trust. The ideal, of course, is to collaborate with an

attentive and zealous publisher, but the reality for most artists in

any medium is that little is guaranteed beyond one’s own efforts. (Even

close friends with “good connections” often fail to come through for

artists.)

Selling a book can seem as difficult as getting a

Democrat into the Oval Office. I’m always surprised by how many people

continue to believe that book publishing is profitable. Publishing is a

problematic business, pretty much across the board: Even imprints owned

by the largest of conglomerates struggle to post enough profit, or show

enough “growth,” to keep their corporate overlords from folding them or

placing them on the trading block. On the other hand, no

self-respecting “shark” would waste his time here, so the industry is

largely free of financial funny business.

Obviously, Temple gets to toot his own horn here, but he has good reason — Akashic’s a small publisher with clout and reputation, and in the crime fiction field, it’s only going to expand with the impending launch of the “Akashic Noir” series as a result of the success of last year’s BROOKLYN NOIR. It remains to be seen, of course, how well these anthologies will do, but considering how much people lament the state of the short story, this has to be a healthy sign that an independent publisher is committed to producing several anthologies of quality work over the course of a year or two.

Though I have a pretty good reason to be excited about the prospect…