ben george’s press recommendations

7/31/2019 Ben Georges press recommendations

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From: Ben George [mailto:[email protected]]Sent: Monday, March 19, 2012 10:39 PMTo: Graham, Steven W. (Academic Affairs)Subject: Re: FW: budget information

Dear Steve,

I do appreciate your very kind words from before. As Speer told you, this success right out of the gate is daunting, and Ido see the humor in it. When I was at the National Book Award ceremony last November, Harold Augenbraum, the head

of the National Book Foundation, joked with me that I should quit now and start my memoir: Looking Back on Lookout.Thats what I mentioned to Speer, and then told him maybe I'd call it a day and start a carpet-installation business, Floorsby George.

Anyway, in seriousness, thank you for your kind words. The night of the ceremony in New York is one I won't forget.

My apologies for the delay. Theres just been so much to do, and to get set up once again in advance of this trip to NewYork. Any visit there is something that a small, independent publisher wants to take full advantage of. And its germane toyour situation there, because the sort of contacts Im making are ones that I think youll want any director of the press tohave or to be able to go out and get. For example, I got a coveted meeting with Gregory Cowles, one of the mainassigning editors for the New York Times Book Review, and this is a chance to pitch him our upcoming books for review.Ill be getting a tour of the NYTBR offices and will discuss our books. With smaller ad and marketing budgets, the attentionof the major review outlets is even more crucial for indie and university presses, and its important to reach out this way.

Apologies, too, for the length of the e-mail that follows. Take what seems beneficial to you and discard the rest. I think youhave a few different options for what direction you can take the U of M Press, and Ill tell you the one that seems to memost exciting, and maybe also talk about variations or combinations.

First, I'm glad that what I sent along before proved useful to you.

I think the situation in Columbia would be exciting to a dynamic incoming director precisely because of the significant levelof top-down support the university has been providing, and because of what is truly possible with that funding and with acommitted staff of ten or so talented people. If that situation changes, with major cuts to funding or staffing, the positionwould become less desirable, and I think you'd have a harder time finding someone truly gifted to head up the press. Noambitious director wants to do just a few books per year. The key is to find the sweet spot -- the appropriate number ofbooks -- which is what well-respected houses like Graywolf have done. They have a staff of twelve. Four of those,including the director, are focused primarily editorially. The other eight are spread among marketing, publicity, accounting,sales, and development. And they're publishing about 25 books per year. They've been in the running for the NationalBook Award twice in the last four years. They have good taste and invest wisely, and their sales are solid. You really can'tbank on doing just two or three books a year, no matter how good they are, and hoping you get national attention. Aconfluence of things that you can't control has to come together for that to happen. (Of course you can work hard andpound the pavement w/ venues like the NYTBR, which is what Im trying to do.) So knowing that certain things are beyondits control, what a press should be doing is publishing as many books as it can publish WELL. As many books as it can do

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in a quality way -- seeking out the superb books from the projects that are available at the resources you have, giving thewriter's work true editorial attention from an engaged mind, and then marketing and promoting the hell out of the books. Ifyou do that enough, you'll have some critical hits. But even a publishing house as august as W. W. Norton, with all that bigmoney from its anthologies backing it and many titles per year, had a drought of four or five years without an NBAnomination in the mid-2000s.

Now, my sense is that you dont want to keep pouring $500K into the press per year. And I dont think you have to. Overthe long-term, with patience, there are all kinds of models that can be worked toward, including some kind of endowedfoundation that operates within the university. And efforts at grant-writing should be much more aggressive. I mentionedGraywolf. Presses like Graywolf and Milkweed consistently get $50K to $60K per year from the NEA. Theres no reason Uof M cant be competing for that level of funding.

But if you really want to cut back that level of support, youre going to have to allow the director to completely change thekinds of books the press is publishing. Its really going to take someone to be bold and brave, and to give support to adirector taking the press in a new direction. Because if you understand the presss mission to include the publishing ofincreasingly arcane scholarly works which are so esoteric that the audience for them is severely narrowed, then I think thepress is going to continue to need a big payday from the university. Books such as these just cant make back all thatsinvested in them. Theyre not designed to. Exactly what the stipend would be, Im not sure. Id have to look at whats beingsupported that isnt in the stipend and probably talk with a few colleagues about their operating expenses to come up witha specific budget. But Id think that you could eventually cut the support down to at least $200K to $300K, down from$400K to $500K, and have a really vibrant press that would be a feather in the universitys cap.

My general take is that UPs can reimagine what their mission is -- and especially if theyre willing to surrender the notion

of themselves as primarily factories that provide tenure credentials. Regarding peer review, for example, when I was lastin New York I paid particular attention to Maya Jasanoff, the winner of this year's nonfiction prize for the National BookCritics Circle Award. She is a tenured historian at Harvard, and both of her books, including this award winner, LibertysExiles, were published by Knopf, the literary imprint of Random House. What purpose does peer review serve -- and doUPs serve as tenure credentials -- when a tenured award-winning historian at one of the world's most prestigiousuniversities has never published with a UP? It just seems to me that the whole model may soon be seen as a dinosaur.My sense, from talking to a few more people since I visited Columbia, is that UPs are reluctant to let it go because beingneeded for a tenure credential justifies their existence and makes them necessary. Without it, they worry they'll be axed.But my view is that a press justifies its existence by publishing excellent, vital works of literature and scholarship, and, inthe case of a UP, by being an integral part of the educational mission of the university. (What Speer has done w/ theMissouri Review in this respect is a prime example.) With all respect to Dean O'Brien and his perspective, I don't think thatthe comments of peer reviewers are as valuable as the reaction to and reception of a book once it's published. That's howits value is determined. Is it considered by the establishment to be a fine literary work, or a piece of scholarship that goes

on to be referenced? That's what matters.

In the current publishing landscape, I think the opportunity for UPs is to step into the gap that certain entirely bottom-line-driven New York publishers are leaving, and to edge toward establishing a really intelligent, well-cultivated list of booksthat in the past would have fallen under the trade category rather than the academic or scholarly category. The ideais to reimagine what scholarly means outside the bounds of being a tenure stamp. Look, any publisher -- commercial oracademic -- will tell you, Backlist, backlist, backlist. Thats how any press sustains itself, by choosing books that provetheir worth over time and continue to bring in revenue for the house years after theyve been published. This is the greatthing about Ediths book. Sure, over $20,000 last year. But the real key is that Binocular Vision is going to be hersignature book. Anytime someone hears about Edith Pearlman and wants to start reading her, theyre going to start withthis volume of New & Selected stories. Its a true commodity now.

From my observation, in the relatively exotic world of publishing, all success is personality-driven. I could cite manyexamples. The right leader provides editorial judgment and vision and attracts a talented nucleus of people who buy intoit. Reputation matters a lot in publishing. Some writers will take less money for their books simply to be part of a particularpublishing house or work with a particular editor, because they know their book will be published better there.

So to go back to apoint above, that's why I don't really think peer review is the right way to go. The key, instead, is for the director, inaddition to his or her own area of interest, to hire brilliant editors in whatever other area(s) he or she decides the pressshould focus on -- literature & some combination of the pillars of the Mizzou Advantage -- and then to let those editors,with their expertise, acquire and work on the books they think will be significant. The best books have always happenedbecause someone with good taste was let loose to follow his judgment. (This book of Edith's that we published --speaking, again, from my own experience -- would have had a hard time making it through at a lot of places. Her last booksold only about 700 or so copies. Few would have had confidence in my proposal. But I had the trust of people here to puttogether a sizable New & Selected and get some big-name writers behind it. With something like 25,000 copies in print,

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the proof is in the pudding, as far as what's possible.)

There are possible compromises, of course. If the U of M Press were to embrace the notion of literature as a major arm ofwhat it's going to do, it may be that, if it's important to key people in the university, some kind of arrangement could bestruck, whereby the literary works were exempted from peer review but the scholarly works still underwent that process. Idon't think that's ideal. But if it preserves greater support within the university, it might be a good compromise. The thing toremember is that anytime youre doing a limited-print-run book with a limited audience, the investment is the same, if notgreater, but its much harder to recoup that cost than it is on a book that can be intelligent and sophisticated, and do theuniversity proud, but with a slightly broader appeal. It just takes a bigger commitment from the university to support theseprojects.

I think another hugely important thing for the press will be partnerships on campus, in whatever way the option bestmanifests itself. Part of that is just because the press needs to become a vital aspect of campus life. It needs to plug in tothe academic mission by involving students in the way the Missouri Review has; it needs to host events and bringdynamic authors to campus; and it just generally needs to be exciting and vibrant, an entity people want to be a part of.Theres a practical element here, though, too, and thats the possibility of saving on human resources and/or office space.

To me, for instance, the most natural partnership of all would be with the Missouri Review. The press and the literarymagazine could become integrated, under the same umbrella. (There is a model for this at LSU Press, which recentlyfolded in the august Southern Review.) Theres no reason someone whos doing marketing and publicity for magazinecouldnt also be doing it for the press. People could work together. And you could promise interns experience in bothmagazine publishing and book publishing. The entities would need to be separate philosophically, of course, with eachretaining its own identity and its own editorial control, without impingement from the other. But so much could be shared.

And as with our setup between Ecotone and Lookout Books, the magazine could even serve as a wellspring for the press,helping the director to discover new talented writers.

The sky is really the limit here. You could become renowned for starting the first Center of its kind: the University ofMissouri Center for the Art of Publishing, or something of that nature. Where some others have seen a doomsday inpublishing, I see a great and invigorating moment for those who can be nimble enough to take advantage of it. Regardlessof what platform people read on, theyre not going to quit reading, and theyre always going to be looking to passionateand creative editors and publishing houses to curate and bring them the best of whats being thought and said.

So the U of M stands at the cusp of possibility. If it blazes a new path forward editorially and creates an environment thatstudents of publishing are clamoring to be a part of, the U of M Press can become a one-of-a-kind place. We're trying thathere in our own limited way. But it would be nothing like the scale of what's possible in Columbia, which could become atrue beacon, an innovative red-hot spot for independent-minded publishing, a conduit for the entrance of great literature

into the world and a training ground for future top-notch editors and publishers. I think that's thrilling.

How the bureaucracy of this works is something you could no doubt provide good insight on. I understand, for example,the desire to make this campus-wide instead of university-wide. But I will say that you and Deborah have shownyourselves to be such creative problem-solvers that I think any director would appreciate an association with you, and thepossibility of calling on you occasionally for support or guidance on bigger matters. Is there a setup whereby the presscould fall under the umbrella of University Wide yet still move onto the Columbia campus and become a vital part ofuniversity life, in some of the ways that were discussed? Such a broad base of support seems to me potentially a verybeneficial way to structure it. But I trust that you know best, and that there may very well be sound reasons to have thepress be campus-wide only and for the director of the press to report to Provost Foster or Chancellor Deaton, or even,theoretically, Dean Mills, if the School of Journalism wants to partner, or Jim Cogswell, if the library wants to. (And theremay also be a way for the J School and/or the library to become involved even in the scenario where the press partnerswith the Missouri Review.)

Regardless, the U of M has a tremendous opportunity right now. Whatever path forward the university decides is best, Ibelieve the key to success, and to achieving notoriety for excellence, will be to endow the director with the necessarycreative freedom to build something long-lasting and unique. Further, if you eliminate the burden of peer review and allowthe director and his or her staff to push works of literature and scholarship for a generally intelligent but not too-specializedreadership, you may be able, as Ive said, to scale back the level of financial support slightly, because in this case eachbook would tend to sell at least a couple of thousand copies -- and some quite a bit more -- rather than a few hundred. Aswell-performing backlist titles accrue, the press will find itself on surer footing over time.

If I can be of any help, I hope you won't hesitate to call on me. Thanks for giving me an opportunity to comment, and goodluck with your planning.

Best regards,


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Ben

On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 10:12 AM, Graham, Steven W. (Academic Affairs)

wrote:

Sounds great. I have a meeting with the president tomorrow morning so having something before our

meeting would be helpful. Thanks and good luck in New York!!

St eve Graha m

Senior Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs

University of Missouri System

309 University Hall

Columbia, Missouri 65211

[email protected]

(573)882-3119

From: Ben George [mailto:[email protected]]Sent: Monday, March 19, 2012 12:56 AM

To: Graham, Steven W. (Academic Affairs)

Subject: Re: FW: budget information

Steve,

I hope you enjoyed the engineers and the St. Pat's Day libations. More travel to New York for me this week

starting Tuesday morning, and I was already behind from the last trip, so I've been hustling to get squared awaybefore I depart. But I know you're in the planning stages there and I appreciate your asking my thoughts. I'll get

you something before I go out of town. Monday night at the latest.

Cheers,

Ben


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On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 2:46 PM, Graham, Steven W. (Academic Affairs) wrote:

Super thanks. I am in Rolla at our S&T campus this weekend (think engineers and St. Pats day) so I am tied up for a couple of days anyway.

Looking forward to your thoughts.

St eve Graha m



309 University Hall


[email protected]

(573)882-3119

From: Ben George [mailto:[email protected]]Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2012 10:53 PM

To: Graham, Steven W. (Academic Affairs)

Cc: Morgan, SpeerSubject: Re: FW: budget information

Steve,

Thank you for the kind words, and the feeling is mutual. I certainly enjoyed getting to spend some time with

you & Deborah, and to see how open you are to approaching this problem creatively. I've been thinking about

this, and will hope to send you something tomorrow. I think that'll be easier than a phone call, so you don't haveto worry about taking notes. So . . . more soon. And thanks for your note.

Cheers,

Ben


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On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 7:26 PM, Graham, Steven W. (Academic Affairs) wrote:

Ben: sorry to keep bothering you but as you can guess we are trying to figure out a model for ourpress moving forward and are really interested some options. See Spears note below. you can sendme some ideas OR if it is easier we can set up a phone call and you could do it verbally.

BTW I dont mind if you keep track of any time you spend on this and at some point send us a billfor consulting hours. I really like the way you think and want to tap your expertise.

St eve Graha m



309 University Hall


[email protected]

(573)882-3119

From: Morgan, SpeerSent: Wednesday, March 14, 2012 12:38 PM

To: Graham, Steven W. (Academic Affairs)Subject: Re: budget information

Steve: Youknow,itcouldbeusefultotheprocessifyouwroteBenGeorgeaquicknoteandaskedforhisbriefopinion

onsomeaboutsomeofthemattersyouandIhavebeendiscussing(what'sthebestmodelforapress;howmanybooks

whatkindofstaffing;whatkindofbureaucraticarrangement)fornomatterwhoevertakesoverthepress. Imsure

hedbegladtooffersomethinguseful.

Haveagoodday,sir!

Speer


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On3/12/126:21PM,"StevenGraham"wrote:

WhatarethosemodelsusedbyGreywolf,CoffeeHouse,andMilkWeed??

SteveGrahamSenior

Associate

Vice

President

for

Academic

Affairs

UniversityofMissouriSystem

309UniversityHall

Columbia,Missouri 65211

[email protected]

(573)8823119

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