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On Letting a Thousand Flowers Bloom
 Art, Creativity and the Business of Publishing
E
arly Stages Press was a small Arts-in-Education publisher that I ran at the start of the 80s. In 1982 we decided to have an adjunct writers’ cooperative under the im-print of Contemporary Literature Series. All the writers involved had come out of thepolitical and cultural movements of the late 60s and early 70s much of which was cen-tred in the San Francisco area. The series which was published in 82 and 83, includedGordon DeMarco’s
October Heat
, Harriet Ziskin’s
Blind Eagle, Stories from the Courtroom
,Celeste McLeod’s
Horatio Alger Farewell
and Ed Buryn’s,
Vagabonding through America
along with a Vietnam era novel I had written called
Letters to Nanette
. The Contempo-rary Literature Series, lasted several years and was, in many ways, quite a successfulventure. We were able to break into the mainstream media and our books were widelyreviewed nationally.
Letters to Nanette
, for example, was given more serious attention bynewspapers, magazines and radio than any of my subsequent titles that came out fromlarge publishing houses. Sales of our books were in the thousands, but without grantsand subsidies, we were soon overcome by the enormous capital expenditures necessaryto keep even a miniscule publishing group going back then.In 1983, I was invited to address the California Writers Congress on the subject of co-operative publishing and the fiction market. Rummaging through my files, I found acopy of what I said. I excerpted a few paragraphs that seem as relevant today as it was back then:Over the past year, we at Early Stages Press have been struggling to break newground as an authors’ cooperative. This is not to say we haven’t had our prece-dents. For example, Writers and Readers in England began as an experiment in bringing authors in closer touch with the production and distribution process of the book business.We didn’t go into publishing naively. Most of us had experience in book pro-duction and distribution. But, even so, breaking new ground always means con-fronting the unexpected. As much as we had thought ourselves liberated from thevestiges of the feudal American publishing industry, we still found that we weretrapped in the quagmire of the greatest imponderable of all: the fiction market.There are many views of fiction, what it is and what it isn’t, but I’m concernedwith two. There is the romantic notion of the Proustian artist, striving for eter-nal glory in a cork-lined room. In this image, we visualize greatness, truth, beauty,fortune, fame, celestial grandeur. But it’s another notion of fiction, far more mun-dane perhaps, that interests me. This is the notion of fiction as social history. In
 
this vision, we see the writer more as an articulator and interpreter of shared ex-periences. In this view each individual work becomes part of a whole, a stitch inthe combined tapestry of our culture. In this vision, writers might not see eter-nal glory, but, with luck and perseverance, they could shed some light on theevolving human condition.I mention these two views of fiction because I believe they help exemplify themyth and the reality of the publishing world today. The myth of fiction is thatthere are a few true artists who, like fresh new cakes of ivory soap, will inevitablyrise to the top of the grubby bath. The myth assumes there are a series of benev-olent and omnipotent individuals whose sole purpose on earth is to recognizeand establish greatness, and, once recognized, to sponsor and support said great-ness till death do they part. The reality is that there are many fictions, all highlysubjective, all very personal, and all with different potential audiences.In fact, commercial publishing decisions have usually been made by people otherthan artists, who might possibly have interests other than the quest for truth and beauty. There aren’t a hell of a lot of people left, especially working writers, whowould disagree with that. Yet, even so, we still hear, from time to time, the ideathat there is a hierarchy of writers, the good published in New York, the mediocrepublished in San Francisco. We even, believe it or not, have reviewers who wouldrather review a book because it was published in New York rather than in SanFrancisco, and, amazingly, libraries which would rather buy books that were pub-lished in New York; and even bookstores which would rather stock books pub-lished in New York.I wonder how many of you have ever heard the term ‘vanity painter,’ or ‘vanityfilm maker,’ or ‘vanity sculptor,’ or vanity singer?’ I wonder how many of youhave ever heard the term ‘vanity press?’ Well, I would like to re-define the term‘vanity press’ for you. A vanity press is a large publishing house usually locatedeast of the Mississippi which is vain enough to print 2,000 copies of a book, giveit no advertising or promotion to speak of, remainder or shred it within twomonths of publication, and then keep the publishing rights for another ten years. A vanity press is one that is vain enough to have its publishing decisions made byits marketing department.Vanity presses have their cohorts. I call them vanity reviewers and vanity dis-tributors. Vanity reviewers usually have incredibly large egos and truly believethey have the power in their little pens to save the world from bad writers. Badwriters, in their frame of reference, are those who either annoy them with un-warranted phone calls or have been ungracious enough to send them a softboundversion of their book. Good writers, on the other hand, are those who have pressagents that know good restaurants, or alternatively can make good conversationat dinner parties.
On Letting a Thousand Flowers Bloom Page 2
 
Vanity distributors are usually not interested in fiction because it ‘doesn’t sell.’But when they are, it often is because the book in question has a nice four-colourcover with a hint of sex. Anyway, we at Early Stages decided to get together and form a legitimate press.One that would question some preconceived notions in the publishing industry.These notions include the following: that all fiction will reach its intended audi-ence through a one-time ad in the New York Review of Books; that a book livesor dies in the first month of publication; that an audience for a book lines up at bookstores waiting for it to arrive; that most reviewers can possibly determine a book’s worth and transmit that worth to the proper audience; that an author andreader must, by nature, be separated by an impossible chasm; and that grossprofit is the primary measure of success.Fiction is, by nature, a delicate medium. Most fiction writers have made them-selves incredibly vulnerable just by choosing to publish. On the other hand thereare new seeds being sown, new technologies that are making it possible for booksto be developed without enormous capital outlays. We happen to live in a mar-vellously fertile area for book production. Thanks to Reaganomics there are hun-dreds of gifted editors, book designers, typesetters, graphic artists, and bookpromoters floating around, looking for work.Why not let a thousand literary flowers bloom? What hove we got to fear? Cer-tainly nothing worse than what we have. I mean we can continue dashing fromgenre to genre, from doom and gloom to self-immolation, from blazing infernosto sadistic spies, from demons to space creatures, all written by talented authorswho feel they couldn’t otherwise get into print.Why not let a thousand literary flowers bloom? So what if some of them turn outto be weeds? What have we got to lose? What are we trying to protect? Sure someof it will be dreck. But the audience for fiction has been so sated in dreck that alittle more won’t hurt them. And who defines dreck, anyway? How can we say forsure what work will strike a spark, what work will create a new vision, what workwill develop a following?In those days there was quite a bit of discussion about how genre writing could beadapted so that serious writers could better connect with the mainstream. Back thenmysteries and thrillers were still mainly a conservative, middle of the road genre, de-spite the fact that the two best known American mystery writers, Hammett and Chan-dler, used their stories quite effectively as a way of exploring contradictions in American societal values. Gordon DeMarco’s Riley Kovaks character was modelled inthe Hammett and Chandler fashion, but Kovaks was very much a lefty detective ex-ploring themes rooted in the struggles of militant labour. I was more interested inwriting what I considered more serious novels, but the idea of trying to investigate is-
On Letting a Thousand Flowers Bloom Page 3
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