An Argument for Writers' Taking Charge

By Johnny Temple, Poets & Writers. Posted April 22, 2005.

In reviewing the third volume in Norman Sherry's biography of Graham Greene for The New York Times last year, Paul Theroux lamented the decline of literature's impact on mainstream culture. He wrote:

It is impossible now for any American under the age of 60 or so to comprehend the literary world that existed in the two decades after World War II, and especially the magic that fiction writers exerted upon the public.

Theroux's point rings loud to writers, publishers, agents, editors, and booksellers alike. Even young people, new to the trade, long for the time we never actually knew when publishing wasn't dominated by faceless corporations and the public was hungrier for good books.

But Theroux takes his criticism of today's literary landscape one step further when he characterizes ours as "an age of intrusion, where publishers conspire with bookstores to bully writers into the open and make them part of the selling mechanism. This weird and philistine exhibitionism is now the way of the world."

It is an odd notion that 21st-century writers are a bullied lot. If anything, writers tend to be ignored by their publishers; most writers can scarcely imagine a situation in which a publisher makes promotional demands of them.

Anyway, writers should embrace the hard work that is now required to promote their books. Too often, authors watch passively as their books fail to climb onto best-seller lists. Some still presume their talent alone will lead to a New York Times review, even though the newspaper can only cover a handful of books every week--while in the year 2003, 175,000 new books were published. There's tough competition out there. Having a book launched by Random House or HarperCollins is no longer any guarantee that high-profile reviews and brisk sales will follow.

I entered the book business through the portal of underground rock music. Along with Mark and Bobby Sullivan, two friends from Washington, D.C., who, like me, had no experience whatsoever in publishing, I cofounded Akashic Books in 1997.

We had grown up playing in bands together in the D.C. punk scene of the '80s, where we were inculcated with a simplistic but sensible "do it yourself" ethos. The idea was that hardworking bands, upstart record labels (often launched by musicians), and dedicated fans could forge a vital, idealistic alternative to the mainstream music business. A culturally healthier business model, we imagined, would place more value on the adventurousness of the music than on the accumulation of capital.

Burgeoning punk labels aspired to provide a cultural counterbalance to the corporate heavyweights; over the past two decades, a small number of giant companies have dominated the industry (and now the book business as well). These behemoths are often ill-equipped to handle art that is not targeted at huge national markets. Always hunting for hits, they routinely overlook brilliant music that may not have mass appeal.

In 1991 three friends and I formed the band, Girls Against Boys. Though we are largely inactive these days, our first CD came out in 1991 and our sixth in 2002. We worked with independent labels for our first four albums, touring constantly in the United States and Europe, before we signed a high-profile deal with Geffen Records, a subsidiary of the Universal Music Group.

It was the money I received from our record deal that gave me the means to begin Akashic. We modeled it after visionary, independent music labels, like Dischord Records in D.C. and Touch & Go Records in Chicago. Although Bobby, then Mark, left the company early on to focus on raising their families, I have worked with Johanna Ingalls, our managing editor from near the beginning, to keep our doors open for business. Now we publish more than 20 books a year; our list is about three-quarters urban literary fiction and crime fiction, one-quarter political nonfiction.

Today's indie publishing community is in some ways reminiscent of American punk rock in 1982. In that era, bands took it upon themselves to carve out networks that would connect the punk scene in San Francisco to the one in Phoenix, the one in Lawrence, Kansas, to the one in Washington, D.C., to Amsterdam's, to Belgrade's, to Israel's, to Bangkok's, and beyond. Working closely with indie labels, bands did the dirty work of booking their own tours and driving in decrepit vans and sleeping on floors and in parking lots--hammering out a vibrant (and, yes, highly flawed) new underground culture where one didn't exist before. A similar grassroots approach to local- scene building--and to the networking between those scenes--is under way in indie literature.

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.)

Johnny Temple is the publisher and editor of Akashic Books. His rock band, Girls Against Boys, has toured the world extensively over the past 14 years. Temple will appear on a panel titled, "Independent Publishing: Risk Takers & Trendsetters," at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, April 23-24.

This article is reprinted with permission of the publisher, Poets & Writers, Inc., 72 Spring Street, New York, NY 10012.

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