Imprint Suspicious

Unmonocrop your reading.

I want to say above the fold here that there will be some changes coming to this newsletter. Or rather, this newsletter will be staying more or less the same, but I’ll be adding a paid tier in the coming weeks. There will still be free newsletters throughout the year, and I’m trying to resist the guilt that comes with asking for money in return for my work. The reality is that the audience for this idiosyncratic publication has grown enough in the last two years that if I can turn to it in a time when I need more financial support to continue doing what I’m doing (writing, running a journal, teaching classes), then I’m going to. I started Sex Weather Climate Death as both a place to share the in-between, not-very-pitchable thoughts, and a way to reach new readers in the lead-up to my book coming out last year. Now, however, I’m thinking beyond books—to classes, the journal, and maybe more *press-ish* things (one day). I’ll write more soon on what this new chapter will look like for SWCD, but in the meantime, please enjoy these Publishing Opinions that begin with fruit.

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In Costa Rica we toured the Dole pineapple plant. There they showed us how sharp a machete needed to be to section a ripe pineapple for to the class. They drove us around and told us to ignore the howler monkeys at the edges of the plantation. Inside the plant they showed us that by growing their pineapple organically at scale, they could choose to label it as organic or not, depending on what would bring the highest profit depending on mercurial price fluctuations, inflation, and consumer demand at any one time. It wasn’t a lie, though it did mean that the same organic pineapple could be bought for less when incognito. As we waited for our bus, a small earthquake made the overhead lighting tremble. 

There are many different kinds of monocrops. To name just a few: pineapples, wheat, bananas, grapes, corn, and books. Anything can be a monocrop if grown exclusively across a large expanse in order to maximize profit over time, labor, weather etc. The trend at the turn of the millennium was to strengthen organic labeling requirements so that health-conscious consumers could avoid produce grown using toxic chemicals and pesticides. Where we’ve ended up, however, is a future in which organic monocrops are not uncommon, and little attention is paid to how the overwhelming sameness of row after row, field after field, impacts the health of the surrounding ecosystem. One recent study reports that while extinction of species is an important metric, long before the disappearing happens there is a slower, longer shrinking of animal ranges that put even more stress on food webs. What matters, they say, is not the number of animals but the quantity and quality of interactions between species.

I’ve been thinking about monocrops a lot while catching snippets of the antitrust trial unfolding as the two biggest global publishers of books get ready to merge into one mind bogglingly large conglomerate. While it has been enjoyable, in a masochistic way, to watch publishing’s most powerful executives claim complete ignorance around profit and loss, marketing, advances, and the mysterious bestseller, it’s also been frustrating to watch the conversation circle meatier issues of how literature and culture are produced without actually engaging them. Not how they are written or forged in the creative minds of this generation, but how they are manufactured, how they are physically made and packaged to be distributed to booksellers and readers. Because while the conditions of creation are what make art Art, how it’s sold to readers (consumers, blech) also says a lot about the health of an industry and where it will go from here.

First, some vocabulary: a press, in the publishing world, is an entity that publishes books. Maybe that seems too obvious, but it’s worth considering the scale at which this happens. A press might refer to a very small press that exclusively publishes poetry, for example, or it might be a slightly larger operation that publishes a wider range of genre and authors, but still completes book production in-house (this is important, and I’ll return to it later). While technology has increased the number of books such presses can put out into the world, there are still factors like time and money that limit how many books a small press can print. An imprint, by contrast, is a faction of editors working under the aegis of a larger company to publish books that cater to a subset of the company’s readership. HarperCollins’s Christian Publishing is an imprint, for example, and so is Harlequin Enterprise (better known as Harlequin Romances) after it was acquired by Harper Collins in 2014 (which in turn is owned by News Corp). Not only are imprints able to work with bigger purse strings, and thereby able to offer bigger advances to authors they think might become bestsellers, but they also effectively fly under the radar of anyone who doesn’t know how to parse a title page. They use different logos than their parent company, different names and mottos, sometimes they even have different websites that fail to link back to the parent company. This is not by mistake. Many presses, instead of folding at the end of the turn of this century, were bought out by larger publishers in a process that winnowed down the number of publishers in operation today, while simultaneously increasing the number of available guises under which corporate publishing can masquerade as something concerned with the object. Imprints make it seem like there are more presses in the world than there actually are.

To me, an imprint says several things:

1. we acquired what we have, either through greed or inheritance

2. we do not believe our readers are capable of very much

3. we would like to purposefully hide some of what we publish from subsets of our readership

This is where I think back to labeling the pineapples. When it suits One World to be identified as Penguin Random House, it’s usually in regards to money and resources at the disposal of editors; when it doesn’t pay to be identified as PRH is usually on the spine or face out, when even a casual customer at a Barnes & Noble might wonder why 90% of the books they read come from the same four companies. During the ongoing trial, executives from Harper Collins excluded the sales from their Christian publishing imprint so that they might appear even a little bit smaller than they actually are, and, I suspect, so that they could prevent more of the reading public who give a shit from seeing just how important it is to them to whip up a religious furor now and again. Or a few years back when Roxanne Gay left Simon & Schuster upon the revelation that they were publishing nazis under a different imprint; people gave her so much shit for that move, by the way, as if by choosing who she wanted her publisher to be and what she wanted them to stand for she was pulling the rug out from under the great teetering house of cards that publishing has become. 

The book is a bestseller, the pineapple is organic—what does it matter how it’s labeled or where it comes from? There is a fourth thing an imprint might say:

4. we do not touch the paper before it has words on it
   
   

While imprints often do have editors who acquire for them exclusively, book production overwhelmingly is not so siloed. It’s a very complicated task to make a book with todays’s technology, and to reinvent the wheel with special book production teams at every imprint would be cost prohibitive. At the very highest end of the production scale, you might have teams specializing in cook books, text books etc., but this is something you will not find at a small press, where generally the books are made in-house, either by editors themselves, book production teams who work closely with editors, maybe occasionally with the help of freelancers.

Given the highly monopolized state of the publishing industry already, regardless of what happens with PRHSS, it’s impossible to take a principled stance and shut out one of the big 5 altogether, because they publish good books too. Living as I do in Oregon, if I dedicated myself to only consuming pineapples grown on local farms using permaculture methods, I’d not be eating any pineapple. But, either we wait for the range contraction to solidify into the extinction of the small press, allowing ‘publishing’ to become just another word for moving money around, and labor exploitation at the Big Four, or we can start the presses we want now. As a writer and a reader, I notice that more and more I am most interested in publishers who are doing interesting things with the production of books that make me excited to rethink a project through their lens. The production of the object is important to me, and while not every title can be letterpressed to perfection, a press that is thinking critically about meaning and products and books in the face of a flattening industry is going to change how I approach my own work and occupation as someone obsessed with words and their circulation, but that’s maybe a screed for another letter.

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What I’m Reading

Her First Palestinian by Saeed Teebi. All of these stories are beautiful and intriguing in some way, but “Cynthia”—so titled for the imaginary girlfriend one foreign exchange student dreams up for himself in the face of ruthless bullying by his American roommates—was my favorite, and made me think differently about what a story can look like when it’s about the stories we tell ourselves. 

Publishing Opportunities

Metonymy Press is accepting submissions for El Ghourabaa, an anthology of queer and trans Arab and Arabophone writers. Deadline Sept 15. Pays $200 CAD.

smoke and mold is open for submissions of translations and associated critical work on a rolling basis, to be published in 2023 IN ACROSS / WITH / THROUGH. Pays $100 USD.

Astra Magazine is open for submissions to its third print issue, BROKE. Deadline October 1. Submissions to its online publication are open year round.

Nature Culture is seeking poetry submissions for From Root to Seed: Black, Brown, and Indigenous Writers Write the Northeast. Deadline Dec 1. Send your nature poems to Samaa Abdurraqib at samaarahmah@gmail.com.