Part II: Changing the Country, One Book at a Time

By Don Hazen, AlterNet. Posted January 27, 2006.

(Editor's Note: This is the second of two parts of our Roundtable Discussion on progressive publishing. You can download the audio of this talk from AlterNet in two parts: Part Three, Part Four. The first half of the discussion was published on Thursday and is available in text and audio formats.)

We resume our conversation on the future and potential of the progressive book-publishing industry. Included in this conversation are:

• Anthony Arnove, an author and editor at Haymarket Books.
• Dan Simon, the founder and publisher of Seven Stories Press.
• Sarah Bershtel, the longtime associate publisher of Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Co.
• Colin Robinson of the New York City-based nonprofit New Press.

AlterNet Executive Editor Don Hazen moderated the discussion, which picks up on the topic of indie versus corporate publishing and the challenge of getting progressive and radical political books reviewed during Bush II.

Dan Simon: I loved something that Colin said a moment ago. He said, "The people are much better than the societies they live in."

Anthony Arnove: Absolutely.

DS: I think it's all in that. I think that what happened after 9/11 was a wonderful year or year and a half of an open window, with the quality of communication between our authors and our readers through us was pure and actually beyond ideology, and it was a beautiful thing. And it was books published by Yale University Press of all places and the progressive publishers, and we would get frequently emails from people saying, "I'm a lifelong conservative, thank you for publishing Noam Chomsky's '9/11'." And I know what they meant. There was a pure moment of communication.

That moment got poisoned somewhat by people trying to cash in on it, but I believe that our whole mission collectively has to be in a sense to keep pace with our readership. People are better than the societies they live in. This is the whole thing. I think that AlterNet is to be credited for publishing that piece by Jennifer Nix in terms of opening up the publishing conversation. I don't agree with Jennifer, but I think that there's a certain amount of …

Don Hazen: Let's say what that conversation was about.

DS: She was saying that star progressive authors should all publish with independent houses. To me, personally, that would be great. [laughter] But I don't agree with it, because there is a complex ecology. I love what Sara does. Sara's a great publisher. We learn from each other. The notion that anyone should do anything that specific is a little bit absurd. However, as an independent publisher, I know that Seven Stories exists and has survived, because several years ago Howard Zinn and Anthony decided to publish a book with us that we then sold vast quantities of, and Kurt Vonnegut, who could publish with anybody, decided to publish with us, and had they not, we wouldn't exist. I could find something else to do if we didn't exist, but we do exist, because they decided to do that.

Now, I wouldn't fault either of them if they decided they wanted to do this book with HarperCollins, which can be a good publisher sometimes, and I certainly wouldn't fault them if they wanted to publish it with Sara. But I think the complex ecology exists partly because people make interesting decisions in that regard. We in America are searching for an oppositional ideology of some kind that will in a sense include this question and partly answer this question. And it cannot be simply anti-corporate, because too much of the landscape is corporatized and too many good people work in corporate settings, and too much good work is done in corporate settings.

But there has to be an attempt to articulate an oppositional ideology that is particularly difficult in this country, because we're all implicated so much as consumers, and we all spend a fair amount of our existence in a kind of corporatized world. So, how can we strike a balance?

DH: Let's stick with this question. Jennifer wrote in March '05, coming off the Lakoff-Elephant book, challenging progressive authors including Amy Goodman, Michael Moore and Al Franken to publish with indies. She offered that a big advance does not make a bestseller. It should be about how many people buy your books. She connected her critique to the notion of media reform and saving democracy. If this were to happen, if everyone were to publish with independent presses, would we have a better democracy?

AA: I think the problem is that we don't want to cede the terrain of corporate publishing to the Right, and that's, in effect, what we would be doing if we followed this strategy. If we said we're only going to publish radical and progressive voices with smaller independent houses, the effect would be to self-marginalize to a certain extent. We need to contest, in the mainstream, the politics of the mainstream. I welcome the opportunity for a Noam Chomsky to be available in an airport bookstore, I welcome the fact that Michael Moore had such a breakthrough success with a commercial publisher that was able to leverage his books in a way that even the best of the independent publishers couldn't have leveraged.

Don Hazen is the executive editor of AlterNet.

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