This essay is Part II of Gina Frangello’s odyssey of founding OV Books…while being wife, mother to three, and keeping up with her own writing. Her full title is, How the Hell Does One Do That? and Other Important Questions for Overworked Masochists. Part I is here.

[Note from Jen Nix: First, I’m happy to not be the Coultergeist of the Left. Second, both Gina Frangello and a writer named in this piece, Josip Novakovich, will be on the faculty this summer at the Beaver Island Writers Gathering, see link in sidebar. And I found the painting here.]

Since the 2000 presidential election, blogs, as well as other alternative media (and advocacy) outlets have revolutionized how politics run in the United States—especially among progressives. These days,it is no longer necessary for a political writer to be “backed” by a corporate publisher or deep-pocketed publicity machine.

In 2004, the scope of this truth was illustrated by George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant!, a slim political primer for progressives about how to take back the country and the vote. Published by Chelsea Green Publishing, a small Vermont publisher that most people had never even heard of, Lakoff’s book targeted online media as its main marketing source and ended up creating—to the shock of anyone who thought they “understood” how publishing works—a New York Times bestseller that has, to date, sold 250,000+ copies and been translated into 8 languages.

This is an amazing achievement for any book, but for a political book put out by an indie press, it was an unheard of triumph over general preconceptions about what a book and its author “need” to be successful. Jennifer Nix (Literary Outpost’s founder, and, at that time, an editor at Chelsea Green and the force behind Lakoff’s unconventional publicity engine) took up the success of Don’t Think of an Elephant as a battle cry for everyone tired of how media and publishing are currently run.

In an open letter, Nix challenged progressive heavyweights like Michael Moore to stop publishing their books with corporate publishing houses that ultimately only funnel money back in the direction of corporatism, and worse still, the Right. Her ideas caught on, and in an amazing stroke of Irony (that would have done Shakar’s The Savage Girl proud), Nix ended up summoned to then-uber-establishment-publisher Judith Regan’s HarperCollins office with a seductive offer to make her “the Ann Coulter of the Left” if she would write a book for Regan! Thankfully, Nix declined (and the Left remains, mercifully, without its own Ann Coulter). Judith Regan, of course, went down in flames shortly afterwards by affiliating herself with one of the only possible agendas more offensive than Coulter’s: her plans to publish OJ Simpson’s If I Did It, and some crazy anti-Semitic remarks, ultimately cost her her job.

While those of us affiliated with independent fiction publishing cheered from the sidelines at Lakoff’s and other political writers’ and indie-published political book victories (including a second bestselling project for Nix, Glenn Greenwald’s How Would a Patriot Act?), our own road was not proving quite as much an unqualified triumph.

Yes, indie fiction publishers do have their own inspirational success stories. Chicagoan Joe Meno, who had published two novels with big publishers (St. Martin’s and HarperCollins) to lukewarm reviews and sales, chose to go with Akashic, an indie run by Johnny Temple, formerly of the punk band Boys Against Girls. Temple runs Akashic pretty much like an indie record label, and Meno was his wet-dream writer—young, funny, personable, tattooed, and highly motivated, Joe piled books into his car and headed out on a 30+ city tour, reading in bars and record stores more often than traditional bookstores, going anywhere that would have him.

The combination of a fun book, a fun author and kick-ass guerilla marketing paid off: Meno’s book, last time I checked, was in its 5th printing and by far outsold the usual novel from a commercial publisher. That said…well, Meno is still far and away the exception in independently published fiction. Without such mega-outlets like True Majority or MoveOn, which can benefit political writers like Lakoff, most fiction writers putting out books without a big marketing engine behind them simply don’t know how to reach large numbers of readers.

Independent fiction presses, ranging from overtly experimental presses like FC2 and Chiasmus, to more general literary presses like Livingston, Sarabande and Red Hen, are usually hard-pressed for money. If the press has a dedicated publicist at all (most don’t), it is one overworked individual in charge of every title on the press’ list. If the authors get any advance at all (most don’t), it’s maybe $1000 and depleted all too quickly on having to fund one’s own book tour, since if one’s press arranges readings and author appearances on a national scale at all (most don’t), it’s still up to the author to fund getting and staying there. If ads are taken out at all (and many indie presses take out no ads, either print or online), they tend at best to be in academic magazines such as The Writer’s Chronicle, because the “big” venues like the New York Times or the New Yorker are so expensive that one such ad could literally fund the production, printing and publicity for several books for many small indies.

As a result of these financial predicaments, most indie publishers keep print runs very small—between 500 and 3,000—because if they cannot widely publicize a book, they can’t make any promises about how they could realistically sell any more copies than that. And for those presses with very small print runs (in the 500-1,000 range), it is often difficult to even afford extensive publicity copies to be sent out for review and other promotional purposes. It is not unusual for no more than 20 copies to be sent out for review, as opposed to the hundreds—even thousands—of publicity copies circulated by bigger publishers. This creates its own dilemma. If only 20 copies are being allocated for review copies, they can’t afford to be wasted on “long shot” marketing. As a result, some independent presses don’t even send their books to the “crème-de-la-crème” of review venues such as the New York Times, Vanity Fair or even Publisher’s Weekly. They may keep things “safe” by sending only to indie-press-friendly venues like American Book Review, Rain Taxi, and much smaller literary magazines that themselves may not have circulations even reaching 1,000.

Such a lack of visibility can guarantee that even great reviews will not help a book sell well, which in turn guarantees that an author—and his/her press—will not really make any money on having published the book. While this may create a personal difficulty for authors, it creates an even bigger difficulty for the press itself, which now has not made back enough money to publish its next title.

Unable to attain self-sustainment, many independent presses have no choice but to rely on grants from arts organizations (which have themselves lost much funding post-2001) and generous individual donors. In such cases, especially when a press is run by all of 1-5 people in total (as is often the case for independents, as it is also often true that most or all of these people are volunteers, working without salary, even the top Editor or founder), spending much of one’s time trolling for grants and donations only further limits the amount of time a press can spend publicizing a book. This original lack of funding, then, becomes a snake that eats its own tail, a vicious circle through which presses and their authors are kept “poor” in a world where lack of funds can mean lack of visibility—especially with superstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders basically making publishers pay for prime positions in stores, and review venues like Kirkus now charging fees for books submitted for review.

It’s important to note that there were already, in 2004, a small handful of independent fiction publishers that seemed able to buck this cycle of invisibility. Not only a couple of very large independents like the formidable Soho, but Johnny Temple’s Akashic, Richard Nash at Soft Skull, Joanna Yas at Open City, and other well-funded indies like McSweeney’s and Tin House, with deeper pockets than the norm and strong social connections in New York. Authors championed by this inner-circle of indies seemed better poised to get reviews in the top venues, to garner awards, to even get picked up by dominant media sources like the Today Show Book Club, enabling such indie authors and their presses to…well, not only get more readers but also finally make a buck, thus allowing future growth. These independent presses were role models in many ways—all their editors tended to be extremely helpful to others in the indie community, and none that I can think of has ever lost their integrity or initial mission, despite having in some cases garnered a fair amount of commercial success and the PR and money that might come with that.

But in other ways, for a press in Illinois or Minnesota or Oregon or Iowa, the successes of these geographically fortunate and socially-connected New York “big boys” (and they all did, with the exception of Open City, the smallest among them, seem to not only be run by men but to favor male authors by a very large percentage) could seem as far away and unattainable as anything happening at Random House.

***

It was with all this in mind that Other Voices magazine began to lay plans to launch its “sister operation:” the all-fiction book press OV Books, which was to specialize in short story collections, novels-in-stories and themed anthologies, as part of our mission to keep the short story alive in book form, avoiding the “ghettoization” of short story writers exclusively to literary magazines that, in part because they are not reviewed in most major review venues, often fail to attract as large and diverse an audience as do books.

At OV Books, we knew a few things going in. 1) We wanted to provide a book tour, even if it was small and limited, and we would help our authors arrange national events even beyond the point where we could no longer fund travel. 2) We would offer an advance, though we knew it would be small. 3) We would publicize our books vigorously, sending out up to 200 publicity copies to review venues, radio programs, freelance reviewers, etc.—and even more if opportunities came along such as free giveaways at a major book fair like BEA. 4) We would publish fiction that was “accessible,” not so experimental as to be aimed at a fringe or strictly academic market, but we would purposely seek out work that was in some way being marginalized by the dominant publishing industry, primarily by virtue of its content being risky, dark or controversial in some way that the bigger literary houses might once have had a place for but had now pushed aside. 5) We would live, eat and breathe a book for at least two years from the time it was selected through its revision process, its copy-editing, its production, its pre-publication marketing, its release, its author tour and its bookstore sales.

We didn’t have any George Lakoff like ambitions—we were not expecting to publish bestsellers. We were not looking for the next The Lovely Bones—much less the next DaVinci Code. What we were looking to do was prove that books of provocative, compelling short fiction still did have a decent audience: that we could make a profit that would fund our next title; that we could put at least a token gratuity in its author’s pocket that would buy him or her a new computer if not a house; that we could attain prestigious reviews that would help further our authors’ careers; that we could continue to build and extend Other Voices’ community into the book market in a small way that might cheer writers and readers who felt their needs and interests were not being represented by the corporate houses.

It would be entirely possible to write an entire book about the logistics of launching a book press—the hoops of getting ISBN numbers and registering your titles with the Library of Congress and holding a contest to launch the press because you have no money to put out a first book without charging applicants an entry fee, and how that in and of itself is a potential landmine because there had been, in 2004, a whole rash of high profile contests that had blithely charged up to $30 per entry and then made these bogus announcements about how all the work they received was inadequate and they couldn’t possibly publish any of them, yet kept all the money—in fact, the AWP (Associated Writing Programs) contest had done this, which had been devastating for its many, many applicants, a good number of whom already had multiple books out and had won awards and were not remotely unpublishable by any sane standards, so OV Books looked like more potentially mercenary assholes charging desperate writers money.

I could go on about how our NEA grant for the year we were going to put out our first book was denied and I was told off the record that a lot of the NEA funding had gone towards some anthology about the experiences of Iraq war veterans, and that even though those veterans no doubt had a lot of worthy things to say, if we hadn’t been in the bloody Iraq war to begin with, the NEA wouldn’t have needed to funnel money away from its longtime literary projects in order to fund yet one more thing to do with the war, and then how we had to find a Big Writer to judge our contest for peanuts (luckily Pam Houston had gotten a story in Best American Short Stories of the Century that originally appeared in Other Voices, so she was generous towards us), and how we were slammed with submissions and I basically didn’t write any of my own work for months while reading hundreds of book length manuscripts.

Then one could write a follow-up book about what precisely it is that makes so many short story collections just not work even when all the individual stories in them are fucking fabulous and have gotten prizes (hint so you don’t need to read that hypothetical follow-up book: All the stories in the collection are basically the same story told over and over again, with different character names, so that the first story you read rocks your world, but by the fifth you’re bored shitless), and then how incredibly fast the money from the contest is eaten up once you actually select a winner (the inimitable Tod Goldberg, in our case) and pay him his advance and print the book, and bang you are broke all over again Instead, though, I talk about the pivotal issue for everyone starting a press, and for every writer published by a smaller independent press: distribution.

Coincidentally, at the same time I was launching OV Books, my own first novel was coming out with Chiasmus Press, a then-fairly-new experimental press based out of Portland, run by longtime FC2 Board member and former two girls review editor, Lidia Yuknavitch. I had taken the (rather devastating) opportunity of my literary agent’s disappearance and the dissolution of his agency as a chance to take matters into my own hands. I loved my agent, but he was known in the industry as a man who got fat advances for his clients, and if he couldn’t get you a fat advance, he basically was of the mindset that I should cool my jets and write another book and get a fat advance for that one. In other words, he had never been receptive to my suggestion that we send My Sister’s Continent to some independent presses, since FSG and Knopf weren’t buying it. Instead, the novel had been in his drawer for over a year, unsubmitted while I was finishing a new novel. Now that his agency was over and he was M.I.A., I was going to have to get a new agent—but it occurred to me that said New Agent would probably not be real interested in a novel that had already been seen by a lot of the top literary editors in New York.

So I decided only to show new prospective agents my new novel, and to send My Sister’s Continent out to the indies on my own. It was accepted in less than one week. Lidia Yuknavitch had published my short fiction in two girls review, and was a fan of my work—she read the novel immediately and bit. So as I launched OV Books, my own novel would be coming out less than 3 months after the first OV Books title. This put me in a unique position of being able to compare and contrast things OV Books and Chiasmus did with varying degrees of success.

This leads me to A Tale of Two Distributors

***

Chiasmus, like a whole lot of independent publishers, uses Small Press Distribution (SPD) as their distributor. SPD is a heroic enterprise run by champions of indie publishing, and as such we all owe them a wealth of debt, yadda yadda. That’s true—we do. But when it comes to getting a new writer’s book into stores, SPD has some serious limitations. They represent some 3,000 books at any one time, and all the books are in a giant catalogue with no plot real description or blurbs, just a cover image and—if I’m remembering correctly—maybe a 1 line description. A short line. So if you happen to be in the SPD catalogue and you happen to be, say, my good friend Cris Mazza who has published something like 13 indie press books of fiction and you are an independent press legend and everyone already knows who you are . . . well, that one sentence tagline might be enough to entice booksellers across the country to order your book. (I say “might” because a lot of booksellers, particularly the larger ones, do not even like working with SPD for a whole host of mainly bullshit reasons I was regaled about by said booksellers, but that is another story about how all things indie are thwarted by the book industry.)

My point is that if you are, well, Gina Frangello, and this is your first book and no bookseller has ever heard of you . . . SPD ain’t gonna cut it. Like independent presses ourselves, the folks at SPD are overworked and underpaid and understaffed. All their well-intentioned heroism doesn’t change the fact that if you’re an unknown writer, you are lucky—very lucky—if 100 copies of your book get into stores nationwide. Awhile after my novel was released, a friend of mine who worked at Borders in Chicago discovered that SPD had not even gotten my novel a Borders ID number, which was necessary to get into the Borders system, and because of this my novel was listed as “out of print” on the Borders computers nationwide and could not even be ordered by friends and family who wanted to buy it there. My friend got my novel a Borders ID, and within a few weeks it was in every Borders in Chicago, one of which sold out a couple of times in one week and kept having me come in to sign more copies—none of which would have happened had I not had my own Borders Guardian Angel to get me into their labyrinthine system with no help from SPD. All of which is not to diminish SPD’s necessity and overall moral goodness and what have you . . . but come on, writers want their books in stores. This confirmed to me that my choice of not going the SPD route for OV Books had been the right one.

OV Books went with the University of Illinois Press as our distributor for our first title, the short story collection Simplify by Tod Goldberg. Let’s start out with why they are evil: they took 50% of our revenue. With almost 10% going to our author, that left OV Books with some 40%. Our first title made twice what we had put into it (printing, PR, events, etc.) its first year—but because we ended up with only 40% of that money—well, remember all that stuff about not even breaking even? Even though our book made money, that was still us! The only reason we even had money to fund a second book at all was that a contest had funded our first.

Now, let’s talk about why, once I renegotiated that crazy profit split, UIP was ultimately good: they got our book into stores. Not a hundred copies. Not a couple of hundred. More than 2,000 copies. For a new independent press for its first book, this is a major coup. The book went into a second printing less than a week after its release, so many stores had ordered it. The reason they had ordered it was that it stood out: UIP, while a very old and esteemed university press, distributes very little fiction, and so their marketing department had pushed the OV Books title vigorously, and we had stood out in their catalogue.

Luckily, Tod Goldberg was also Joe Meno-esque in his initiative and tenacity in marketing his own book. Like Joe, this was Tod’s third published book but his first indie-press book. Tod and I had worked intensely on revising his collection—many times we emailed drafts and comments back and forth for hours. When we brought him to Chicago, I chauffeured him around and he stayed at the founder of Other Voices magazine’s home. We had booked him several Chicago bookstore readings, and I had promoted his book on our local public radio station; we also threw him a splashy release party at the Chicago Cultural Center, attended by local media and book people from the Chicago Reader, TimeOut Chicago and Bookslut. We obtained killer blurbs for him and all but stalked reviewers. Other than the Cultural Center party, we did not spend scads of money.

What we offered Tod was our time and energy—and in the end he ended up saying publicly many times that OV Books had been his best publishing experience, even though we had been by far the smallest press he’d worked with, and he had received a smaller advance. Tod promoted his book all over the country, partially on our dime but largely on his own. He used every market from blogs to JCC meetings to sell copies. I will never forget driving him to the airport to fly home after his Chicago events, and his brother calling from California to read him the LA Times review while we were in the car. It was—like every single review of Simplify—a rave.

I remember Tod saying to his brother, “I’m in the car with my editor right now,” and feeling the kind of thrill recently married people experience the first time they say the phrase “my husband” or “my wife.” It was September 2005. OV Books had become a reality. Our first author was listening to his LA Times rave over the phone, referring to me as “my editor” as though it were the most normal thing in the world. Some months later, Simplify would be nominated for a Southern California Booksellers Association (SCBA) Award, and I would go to Los Angeles to attend the awards dinner (though I would end up, through various confusions, at the wrong hotel and wandering into a Forest Rangers Convention with my co-Editor Stacy Bierlein, a glamorous California girl, both of us considerably overdressed for the occasion of Forest Rangery, and only making it back to the right hotel in time to hit the bar with Tod’s wife, the writer Wendy Duren.)

That year, Tod’s book was the only independent press title nominated for the award. OV Books was real, all right. We had “made it,” by all accounts. Fabulous reviews in venues like the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, Bookslut. A second printing. Our author a finalist for the same award as venerables like Aimee Bender.

And we were still broke.

People, independent publishing is not for the weak-hearted…or anyone who wants to make a decent living. OV Books is now on our third title, and our fourth is in the midst of the revision process, and I am exhausted, and we are still broke.

Our all-volunteer staff decided in 2007 to close Other Voices magazine in order to better devote our unpaid, scarce time to the book press, which has been making a genuine impact in the literary arena if on a small scale. Our third title, A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection, is a truly groundbreaking anthology defining culture through relationship, and including such writers as Nathan Englander, Josip Novakovich and Francesca Marciano alongside brand new writers, some published for the first time in English.

To this date, to my knowledge none of our books has ever received anything less than a glowing review. (Okay, the Publisher’s Weekly review for our second title, O Street by Corrina Wycoff, read kind of like a book report, but that’s PW for you.) We’re hosting events around the country and participating at book fairs from AWP to West Hollywood Book Fair to Printer’s Row to BEA. But at the time of this writing, a year after its release, we have not even been paid for our second book. Distributors are notorious for this, always late in payment. (With Other Voices magazine, the infamous Bernard DeBoer stiffed us for thousands of dollars before it finally declared bankruptcy and folded.)

In the final analysis, even Richard Nash of Soft Skull fame needed to hitch a wagon to Counterpoint in order to avoid financial ruin. Blogs like Bookslut and the Litblog Co-Op (which championed my own first novel, naming it a “Read This!” finalist for Spring 2006) help independent fiction publishers get the word out about their books without having to rely on costly or traditional avenues, but when push comes to shove, even the NEA reports that reading literary fiction—reading anything—is just plain down in this country. Fewer than 50% of Americans read any book at all in a given year—this includes things like books on golf or cooking!

So unless you are . . . well, Alice Sebold, for whatever griping I may have done about The Lovely Bones…it is hard as hell to translate critical praise into concrete book sales, and anyone who manages it should be commended. A press can do everything as aesthetically “right” as possible, and work PR like mad, and still not know where their next printer’s bill fee is coming from.

By 2007 I was teaching at two universities just to pay my childcare fees for my unpaid work on OV Books. Since My Sister’s Continent had come out while I was 9 months pregnant, I’d paid for a freelance publicist in lieu of the guerilla book tour my doctors—and then my infant son, who was nursing—wouldn’t let me take.

And as for my own writing? What writing? I was already working more than full-time and raising three kids. Despite OV Books’ on-paper success, it seemed unlikely we could go on this way for long. I was beginning to wonder if the whole endeavor had been a pipe dream, and if OV Books would end up being just one of the dozens of indie presses that bursts onto the scene only to quietly fold a few years later, never to be heard from again.

I spoke to very few people about these concerns, not wanting to “discredit” the press while it was still kicking. One person I did speak to, however, was my longtime online acquaintance Dan Wickett, founder of the Emerging Writers Network, a member of the Litblog Co-Op, and a founding Editor of Dzanc Books, which I had encouraged him to start. Dan and I emailed briefly about the dilemmas of independent publishing and trying to scrape together funding. I told him I was close to throwing in the towel. Less than 24 hours passed.

Then my phone rang…

[Final installment: Part III: Enter the Oxymoron: Dzanc Books and the Independent, Not-for-Profit Conglomerate, to come]