I recently communicated with Jason Pettus of CCLa — the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [link].
The Center not only publishes, but is a full-range art center working in a variety of media with an even wider variety of artistic approaches.
CBT: How are things in the publishing industry at the moment?
Has it recovered from the economic crisis of 2008?
Or is a depressed market the new normal?
JP: Well, it’s important that we first acknowledge that there’s
actually two publishing industries right now, much like how you see in
the music industry these days as well — there are the traditional big
companies still doing things a traditional big way, with lots of
middlemen, inflated salaries and outdated business practices; and
there is a growing mass of micro-companies, bedroom businesses, and
basement presses, taking advantage of things like ebooks, special
limited-edition paper runs, low overhead, Etsy-style direct product
fulfillment, smart marketing, and much more humble expectations. So in
that context, things continue to be terrible for that first group, and
is fated to get only worse and worse; while things continue to look
better and better for the second group, as they’re able to wrangle
more personal profit per physical unit in a world where overall
physical sales will continue to do nothing but drop. We are fast
approaching an age where the world will no longer need trade
paperbacks or the big-box stores to sell them, just like we now live
in a world that has almost entirely gotten rid of music CDs and mall
record stores whatsoever; this is going to be a permanent change in
our society, and the companies who choose to hold on to a business
model that relies on moving millions of cheap paperback books are
simply fated to go bankrupt, sooner rather than later, to be replaced
by the companies that right now are only micro-businesses and the
like. If you’re one of those latter people, right now is actually one
of the most exciting times in the entirety of arts history to be a
publisher.
CBT: For several years now, articles have appeared claiming e-books have
passed a tipping point, and are now an established part of selling books.
Does this jibe with your own experience as a publisher? Or is small press
literary publishing still based on print?
JP: It’s hard for me to make that kind of assessment, because we follow
a different business model at CCLaP than most publishers do; we
essentially give away our ebooks for free, simply as a promotional
campaign instead of traditional ads (or, that is, we offer them on a
“pay what you want” scheme, although 95 percent of our readers choose
the free option), then sell a special handmade paper edition for $20,
a full $16 of which CCLaP keeps because of skipping distributors and
bookstores altogether, taking Paypal payments at the website and
directly shipping them to customers ourselves via USPS Priority Mail.
That’s the only way we can afford to give away the ebook version for
free, because under a traditional
paperback/distributor/bookstore-Amazon system, we could only charge
$15 and would only get back around $4 per copy after paying off all
the middlemen. Using free ebooks primarily for promotional purposes
has been FANTASTIC, especially when combined with their Creative
Commons licenses; readership of any given title is often in the
thousands instead of the usual dozens of a basement press like
ourselves, we’ve been nominated for awards, we’ve had students make
film adaptations, we’ve had superfans translate them into other
languages and draw them as comics, and a lot more. In turn, this has
simply fueled more and more interest in the paper editions of each
title, and I guarantee that CCLaP would only have maybe half the sales
it currently does if not for all the hype that has surrounded the free
ebooks (not the least of which is that it makes for a nice easy hook
for mainstream journalists — “It’s just like Radiohead!” — which has
profoundly increased the amount of media coverage we’ve received). I
passionately encourage all small publishers to consider moving to such
a model themselves, instead of constantly worrying about squeezing
every last penny they can out of a digital file, fretting over lost
sales via piracy, and being preoccupied with every new TOA change at
the Kindle Store.
CBT: How about funding from arts councils, patrons, and so forth? Is it
keeping up?
JP: Again, we do things a little differently than most other arts
centers, in that CCLaP is technically a sole-proprietor for-profit
company, so cannot accept grants, funding from arts councils, etc. I
have so far never asked our patrons to directly contribute to the
center, but rather to simply buy our commercial products and support
CCLaP that way; however, next month we’ll be running our first-ever
Kickstarter campaign, to hopefully raise the several thousand dollars
we need to subsidize the plane tickets a half-dozen of my authors and
myself recently bought, for our upcoming four-day mini-tour of New
York City. We’re going to do a second Kickstarter campaign this
summer, to raise money for scholarships for our first attempt in
August at a CCLaP summer teen writing camp; and then we’re doing a
third Kickstarter campaign in November, to pre-sell an expensive
illustrated oversized edition of our coming holiday book, the
surrealist story collection “The Kickstarter Letters” by David David
Katzman, as a way of raising the money needed to actually print them.
I’m fascinated to see how these first three fundraising campaigns go.
CBT: CCLaP has its fingers in a variety of pies. Other presses follow a
similar strategy: for example, Biblioasis in Canada puts out a lit mag plus
books, Melville House has a culturally influential blog, etc. Is this a sign
of things to come? Will small press publishers have to be publishers plus?
JP: Well, once again, I’m hesitant about guessing whether this is the
future of all publishers, since CCLaP was designed a little
differently from the start — that since we are a full arts center
instead of just a small press, our entire core business model is
premised on the idea of a small amount of sales from a bunch of
different little products and services, using one small central
marketing budget and a tremendous amount of cross-promotion from area
to area to promote and advertise it all. I’ll tell you what I DO think
is a sign of things to come, though, and which all small publishers
will have to become, which relates to something I said above –
they’re all going to have to become connoisseurs and producers of
books as actual art objects, something that people want to buy as much
for the presentation and materials as for the content itself. In a
world where billions of artistic projects are now available
instantaneously in digital form almost for free, it’s going to become
increasingly difficult by the year to monetize this collection just
for its own sake, and I think small publishers do themselves a favor
by converting to this new attitude as soon as possible themselves, and
to start creating things that people buy precisely because they like
holding them and feeling them, instead of expecting to make their
money anymore merely from intellectual content.
CBT: What sorts of spoken word evenings and authors’ events is CCLaP involved
in?
JP: We don’t do a lot of them right now, mostly because there is just
such a wonderful plethora of literary groups in the city these days
already doing much better and more popular shows themselves; it’s
truly one of the most dynamic times in Chicago history to be a writer
here. But the long-term goal for CCLaP is to have our own permanent
physical space by 2020, including a professional-level performance
space that will likely double as a photography gallery; at that point
we’ll start doing live events a full seven nights a week. That said,
like I mentioned before, a half-dozen of my authors and myself will be
traveling in New York City from Thursday, May 31st to Sunday, June
3rd, and doing four shows on all four of those nights, two in
Manhattan and two in Brooklyn; the details won’t be announced until
May 1st, but once they’re posted, you’ll be able to find them at
http://www.cclapcenter.com/nyctrip . This is another long-term goal of
CCLaP, to host at least one big out-of-town trip a year, and to get
the authors’ collective audience to help subsidize it by purchasing a
special compilation featuring all-new pieces by each of the writers
going; I’m hoping to go to the San Francisco Bay area in 2013, and
then maybe the UK for a full two-week tour in 2014.
CBT: What projects are you working on that you’re excited about?
JP: Well, there’s the summer teen writing camp in August that I
mentioned; and then in September we’re doing our annual fall
anthology, a special project each year designed mostly as simply a
goodwill gesture towards the local community, and a chance to publish
as many Chicago writers as possible each year. But this year, instead
of a book, the anthology will be a special 12-part audiobook podcast
series, featuring serialized genre stories by local authors all done
in the style of a Victorian penny dreadful, which I’m calling “CCLaP’s
A Podcast Dreadful.” And episode number four (this coming September
7th) will be done as a radio show in front of a live audience at
Quimby’s Bookstore in Wicker Park! I’m really excited about this one,
to tell you the truth, and I think it’s going to eventually produce
something quite memorable. I’m looking for writers for this project
right now, and they don’t necessarily have to live in Chicago either,
so I encourage interested parties to drop me a line at cclapcenter
[at] gmail.com.
