Working in the Big Guys’ Blind SpotsAn interview with Steerforth Press

In April 2005 I drove from Boston to Hanover to meet the group behind Steerforth Press: novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas Powers; Michael Moore with his background in magazine writing and editing, involving time at Esquire and Rolling Stone; novelist Alan Lelchuk; and Chip Fleischer. On the drive there I took a detour to South Royalton, Vermont, to see the place Steerforth Press began in 1993. In Hanover I was present at one of the regular partners’ gatherings involving an evening meal in a hotel restaurant opposite Dartmouth College oval, at which the four discuss the progress of the Press.

The next day I again met up with Alan and Chip over breakfast in a Hanover diner in the main street of town for the purposes of the interview published here. Alan left to do some business of his own and Chip and I moved on to Lebanon Street Hanover and the Steerforth offices. The interview was revised via email contact and completed in July 2006. My opening question was concerned to establish the circumstances of the founding of Steerforth Press. Alan Lelchuk led off the response.

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NK: Could we clarify at the outset the circumstances of the founding of Steerforth Press? Thomas Powers, Alan Lelchuk, and Michael Moore are referred to as ‘publishers and senior editors’, and Chip Fleischer is usually designated as ‘publisher’.

AL: We were three people – Tom, Mike and I – with very different temperaments, very different backgrounds, very different biographies and very different personal interests. But we all loved books. That was the common denominator. We had no idea whether this thing would work really, and the fact is that it worked doubly in the sense that we got good books in a whole variety of fields, we stayed very good friends, maybe even got better friends as the years went on, we had some very good arguments, and sometimes we lost and sometimes we won. Frequently for me, the actual editorial meetings, discussing the books, was a kind of literary experience.

Once we let it be known to friends around the country that we were establishing a book publishing house, we got writers from all over who chipped in and said, ‘I know about a Moritz Thomsen book, but you gotta call the woman in Hawaii at six in the morning because she’s doing her Zen exercises otherwise,’ and we call and the woman in Hawaii says, ‘well the rights are in Ecuador, you have to call the lawyer,’ you know, and then you find him in the jungle – and the guy turns out to be an old student of mine who was the lawyer for Harvard University Press. And you find the book, you get the rights, you publish the book, it’s a great book, and no attention whatsoever is paid to it, absolutely no attention. And you realise that that’s what we’re there for, to publish. This is our great deficit, and also our great virtue, the fact that we’re willing to continue to be foolish and impractical. Fortunately, in recent years Chip has made us more practical. But we were always ourselves, we were always politically incorrect, or anti-political correctness. We weren’t interested in books because they were gay or black or Jewish or Italian or anything like that. We were just interested in the quality of the content and the writing. And we stuck to those guns, more or less. The only thing I think in looking back, is that to support the aesthetic impulse, we really needed to be more pragmatic, which means cookbooks, books which would sell (in Yiddish, ‘dreck’), which would support the larger aesthetic impulse. But the impulses are the same. And Chip, who is the economic main point man, loves books, knows a good book, is able to tell who is a political operator in the world of literary politics. So we’ve not changed at all, we’ve just had to adapt ourselves to a more banal existence in order to go on.

CF: We’ve also learned unexpected lessons. With our fiction list I came to learn that the books I loved the most were the ones that had no prayer of selling. And that put us in an awkward situation where if I was going to be passing judgement on fiction that might be able to sell, I would try to size it up cynically by saying, ‘I think this is overly sentimental but it’s only sentimental in the way that this other book that sold really well is sentimental.’ You can’t pick fiction that way. And it puts us in a real bind to discover that what we know and love best isn’t what is going to sell. There have been times where I have received a manuscript that I absolutely loved, and I’ve said no to it because I can’t figure out how to sell it. Then when another publisher picks it up and publishes it, I’m so happy that I can go to the store and buy a copy for $25, knowing that I didn’t have to spend $30,000 publishing it.

But there are still some writers whom we regard extremely highly, such as the Israeli writer Yehoshua Kenaz, whom we can’t sell. We’ve published four books by him, and one of them is a great novel, The Way to the Cats. And you know, if he turns in a book, and it’s a good book, we’re going to publish it, even though we’ll sell maybe 2000 copies just trying to break even. I think there are very few great writers, but he’s one of the very few writers who is that good. It’s as simple as that.

NK: Chip, can you say something about how you came to be involved with Steerforth? Some newspaper and magazine pieces say you came to the press after ‘burning out on Wall Street’.

CF: I wasn’t on Wall Street long enough to have had what anyone would call a career, and certainly not long enough to have ‘burned out’. My first job out of college was working for Merrill Lynch, but within a year and a half I knew investment banking wasn’t for me. Then I went to work in the social service sector, for Goodwill Industries, and quickly realised that wasn’t for me either. I came back to Hanover, at first covering sports for the local paper and doing freelance technical writing for financial institutions. But then I enrolled in a graduate program at Dartmouth to do a Master’s degree, studying literature and creative writing. I was finishing my graduate work and I had no idea what I was going to do next. But I was already entertaining the idea of looking for work in publishing. Alan was one of my professors and he was talking to Tom and Mike about wanting to start a publishing company. So the four of us started meeting regularly and since the others had never put together a formal business plan or run capital projections in any way, that’s the role I took on. When we started the company, Mike and I were the two who were really working on it full time. Mike’s job was to be the editorial director and oversee production, and I dealt with everything else on the business, the promotional, and sales and marketing sides. And for me it was all new, I was a complete neophyte. During those years when we were organising the company I was talking to people in publishing, meeting as often as I could, going to conventions and seminars, but still most of the lessons I learned were from on-the-job training, and that’s how we got started.

NK: Steerforth is described in publicity and its catalogues as an entity that covers lots of different geographies. In 1998 it was described as ‘a limited liability company registered in Kansas and doing business in South Royalton, Vermont’. In 2005 it is doing business where we are talking, in Hanover, New Hampshire. Perhaps you could comment on the way you all originally conceived of Steerforth, not as a regional publishing house, but as ‘a New York house with Vermont overhead’, as some of your early publicity put it.

CF: We had always intended to be based in Vermont, but it was also our intention to do books of national and international interest and importance, not in any way to be a ‘regional’ publishing company. We knew that the centre of the publishing universe would remain in New York and happily Vermont is not that far from New York, so we can travel back and forth. But when it came to forming the legal entity that would be the company, at that time, a sort of hybrid between S corporations (companies owned by individuals who hold stock equity shares) and partnerships called ‘limited liability companies’ (or LLCs) had been created. My father is a tax lawyer out in Kansas City, and he had formed some LLCs for people. And at that time, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming and Florida were the only states that had LLC statutes. So we formed the company in Kansas, although we’ve always operated in Vermont.

NK: What are the advantages to a publisher of being an LLC?

CF: These days, the limited liability company structure is everywhere; I’m guessing every state has a statute allowing for their creation. The advantage is that they provide the liability protection of a corporation with the taxation benefits of a partnership. Also, S corporations, which in the past had always been the preferred structure for small businesses or single owner enterprises, only allow individuals to invest. With LLCs, any legal entity can be an investor and you can carve up ownership and cash flow rights more easily and creatively than with S corporations.

NK: How would you characterise the different aesthetic interests of your editorial entourage at Steerforth?

AL: The individuals were quite mixed in their interests and passions. For example, Tom’s passion was for spies and the history of skulduggery and all the paraphernalia connected to that, at the time, semi-esoteric field of interest. My interest was literature and all sorts of good fiction though I had a bias against certain kinds of trendy minimalist fiction, a whole variety under that category, which I was not interested in. And fortunately we also had Mike Moore, who was interested in fiction, but his passions were different from mine. And we all loved books. And Chip, who had always been a reader, also loved books. In the early years Chip didn’t directly have a vote on what was published but he would read all the books and give an opinion. So you had two guys who were really interested in fiction, Mike and me, and you had one guy who was essentially interested in non-fiction, Tom, and you had Chip, who had a general interest. And there was one common principle, which was, whatever it was, make it very good. It could be any kind of book so long as it was really written well, with intelligence, for a reader of taste.

NK: What animated the decision to develop the ‘Steerforth Italia’ sub-series of books on all things Italian: literature, non-fiction, travel books and cookbooks?

CF: That idea was Tom’s, and it came to him from looking at his own personal bookshelf. Tom’s first job out of college was writing for an English-language daily newspaper in Rome, which was a well-known nest of spies during the Cold War, though Tom says he himself was never employed by the CIA.

When Tom got out of college, he got married and went to Rome, and fell in love with all things Italian, and read all the great twentieth-century Italian writers. These were writers who had been translated into English and published, primarily by Farrar Straus, and by Harcourt. And Tom was looking at his bookshelf and realised that all those books and writers that had been well published, with the exceptions of Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino, had gone out of print. They just weren’t available in English at all. His idea was that we could quietly and creatively gather together on one list a lot of the top Italian writers of the twentieth century. As it turns out it wasn’t nearly as easy as it appeared it might be. In many cases the books were out of print, but the rights had not been formally reverted. So the agents in Italy who had never heard of Steerforth Press before suddenly had an opportunity to go to Farrar or Harcourt, places like that, and say, ‘please print more books or we’re going to ask for the rights to be reverted’. So oftentimes we ended up performing a public service by expressing an interest in a book, and not getting it ourselves, but causing it to be brought back into print by someone else.

But many others we did get, including the English language rights to works by writers like Moravia and Silone. And we started with the classics. Along with them we did a new book, Open City: Seven Writers in Post-War Rome, an anthology put together by William Weaver, who wrote a substantial biographical foreword. After the war he had known all seven of the writers in Rome whose works were in this collection. We used that volume to make the argument that Tom wanted to make about twentieth-century Italian literature, and instead of just sticking the reprints out there, we put them out in such a way that they would get noticed. And even though the anthology contained stuff that had already been published, it had this new piece by Weaver, and it was on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, and was well reviewed in a lot of other places. And it launched the list.

But the idea behind ‘Steerforth Italia’ wasn’t just about picking up these classic works. It was an example of one of the things that good quality publishing companies had done in the past, to look overseas for projects, because it’s harder for a young company without a backlist to compete for the top-selling domestic stuff. So you have to find quality material from abroad. In doing that you could cast about, pick up a book from Austria this year, a book from Japan next year, and a book from Norway the year after that. Tom’s thinking was not only that we could pick up all these Italian classics to create a foundation for the line, but that we could also concentrate on Italy in general, since Italian wine, food, fashion and sunshine are of eternal interest to Americans. And if we built a specialty list of things Italian, we could do contemporary fiction, but we could also do travel writing and cookbooks, and that’s what we’ve done. It does give you a sense of focus, and it also gives you an identity. Even though Steerforth still might not be known at all to major publishers in a lot of other countries, all the Italian publishers know Steerforth. And they send us contemporary works and other projects to consider.

AL: The phrase Chip used earlier when he said we actually ‘performed a public service’ in doing that, I think is worth picking up on in relation to us more generally. In a curious way our commercial failures in the first six or eight years went alongside our remarkable literary successes, which to my mind performed a public service in the literary world at large by showing you could have a press that was dedicated to really good books, and actually make a splash with this kind of quality publishing. Again and again we were getting publicity that far exceeded who we were and the number of books we were publishing, because we were looking for books of excellence. We turned up books of excellence in a variety of fields, and this led to lots of different people, including the New York Review of Books, suddenly saying, ‘we’re going to start re-publishing good books, classics and so on’. Initially we were treated like a little prince in the field; we would go places and people would come up to us and say, ‘you’re Steerforth Press, you publish such wonderful books and you publish them so beautifully’. So we performed a public service in the world of belles lettres, in a curious way. Other firms were good firms but they just didn’t get lucky with the timing. At that time Tom’s name and my name were known, and Mike knew a lot of people, we all knew a lot of people.

NK: So you could get famous people to blurb books, as is the case with some smaller and independent presses in Australia?

CF: But even more important than the blurb was getting somebody to convey the idea to potential distributors, review editors, whomever, that we were serious guys who were going to publish in a sophisticated way. For instance, in addition to Tom and Alan and Mike being known, the advisers whom we listed on our catalogue were important. They had really never done any work for us, they’d never convened in any formal way, but they knew Tom, Mike and Alan and appreciated what we were trying to do and were generously willing to have their names attached to our enterprise. This helped us to send out the message, ‘Steerforth is not just another country bumpkin firm, it’s sophisticated’. We were doing this from the countryside of Vermont and publishing real books, you know. Early on there were questions like, ‘how are they doing this stuff from there, they have no New York office, they have no big advances at all, how are they doing this?’ So that too was part of the allure and the mystery of the literary success of Steerforth. And it did give us credibility. Our advisers have also been instrumental in alerting us to some of the more interesting projects we have published through the years.

I meet with the major review editors of newspapers and magazines, and one of the things I really like about those meetings is that it’s not like dealing with, say, a radio show producer where you’re trying to give them a hook as to why it would make for great air time. Instead, you go and have a substantive conversation, it’s not hyping, and it enables me to do something like the following. We did a softcover reissue of a book several years ago. We called it Shooting at the Moon, which was the title the author, Roger Warner, had always wanted. The publisher in hardcover was Simon & Schuster, who had foisted upon him the title Back Fire, which he never liked, never wanted. They also weren’t that thrilled with the book he turned in, and despite having paid him a very large advance, they did a small print run and didn’t promote it anywhere. I think the reason was that, as he did his research, Roger found the real story wasn’t necessarily the way he had presented it in his original proposal. Rather than a scathing indictment of American involvement in Southeast Asia, what Roger discovered when he started looking into it – and this was something that Tom picked up on and was sympathetic to – was that the intelligence operatives who were running the low-level war in Laos in the early years were doing an incredibly capable job. They were running an effective intelligence operation using indigenous people to stave off the communists. It was when the embassy in Bangkok started taking over the management of this war and the bombing across the border ordered by the White House started, that the whole thing became a bloody awful disaster. The way that Roger ended up writing the book is, you’re two hundred pages in before the US operations spin out of control into catastrophe. For the first 200 pages you’re actually getting a very favourable view of these fresh out of college CIA operatives sent over to run the local operatives.

So the book came out in hardcover, but it really wasn’t published well, and since the author had consulted Tom when he was writing it, Tom knew the story of how the book was published. We asked for paperback rights, got them and then I went to the New York Times Book Review, which had not reviewed the hardcover, and was able to say to the book review editor – and this is just one example of the many cases where this happened, where I’d invoke Tom or Alan’s name – ‘this is a project of Tom’s, he was familiar with this book when it was being written, he realised it didn’t get the notice it deserved, it’s an important, absolutely unique, story, it’s the only book that tells this chapter of American history’. We ended up getting a full-page review in the New York Times Book Review for our paperback reprint. Another nice thing that we have going for us in meeting with these review editors, and one of the reasons we get an outsize amount of coverage for our size, is that we can explain to them why we think a book is especially good or important. For instance, Funeral at Noon, by another Israeli author we published, Yeshayahu Koren, got an incredible review in the Boston Globe. The Boston Globe has very limited review space, they don’t have a separate book review section the way the New York Times or the Washington Post does. And typically they have to cover all the big new books, Jane Smiley or John Grisham or whatever, and books of local interest. The publication twenty years after the fact of a little-known Israeli novel is not the type of thing they would usually cover. But when I was down there I was able to say, ‘if you have the space, and you’ve got a reviewer who is really interested in quality literature, this is a great book’. And they ended up reviewing it. Again and again we get reviews based on that sort of credibility, which I’m very careful not to abuse. I’ll go in, listen to a book review editor, find out what his or her priorities are at the time, and I’ll pick my one shot, and say, ‘I’m not going to pester you with these other ones right now, but this is one you really should give attention to’. And we’ve been able to maintain that kind of relationship with book review editors throughout.

NK: When I’ve talked to other independent presses about how they set up their businesses they often mention that the initial problem is the lack of a backlist that could be bringing in some money as you set about your business. Was that an issue for Steerforth in its early days?

CF: When we were first starting up we were asking advice from everybody we knew, everybody whose opinion we respected, and they all said, ‘no matter how much money you start with, it won’t be enough, without a backlist you’ll be amazed how much capital you’re going to go through’. And in fact a few people said, ‘what you really should do with your start-up money is buy another company or someone else’s list, and then start publishing the books you’re interested in publishing on top of that’. We didn’t do that, and they were absolutely right. It ended up costing us a lot more initially than we thought we were going to need, and we had to have a couple more rounds of raising funds in the first eight years. There were other issues too that went with it, figuring out what works for us and what works in the marketplace generally these days.

NK: What books have done best for you sales-wise and how did you come to acquire them?

CF: A lot of it was being open to publishing opportunities when they presented themselves, even if they weren’t areas that any of us had a particularly strong interest or knowledge in. The first and best example would be a book we did back in 1995 called Poem a Day. Not only did we never intend to publish poetry, we made it very clear that we weren’t going to publish new poetry because none of us had the background to make the judgements and to be poetry editors. Poem a Day is really a British book which was published in the UK under the title Poem for the Day. Nicholas Albury was the driving force behind it, a man I never met. He had an ‘Institute for Social Inventions’ or something, and also ran the Natural Death Centre which helped people die in dignity at home. He created the anthology to raise funds for these organisations. Tom Powers somehow came upon the book in the UK, and brought it to one of our editorial meetings and said, ‘I think this thing could really sell here too’. We’d never done a book like it. It was a heavily English collection so one of the things we did was Americanise it. We took the book that they had produced and had an American poetry professor who was a friend of Nicholas Albury’s exchange 100-150 English poems with American poems. We’ve now sold over 100,000 copies of that book without it being reviewed anywhere, without any advertising, without paying for any in-store promotion. And typically, any store you go into will have one copy on the shelf, but when that copy gets sold and the barcode is scanned, another copy comes to replace it, and week in and week out it sells more or less the same number of copies. Since then we’ve done Poem a Day 2 and Poem a Day 3. I don’t think we’ll do any more.

NK: Were those sequels initiated by you or did they too customise a pre-existing English version?

CF: Volume 2 was initiated by Steerforth. Volume 3 was initiated by Nicholas but he was hit by a car and killed midway through the work. The people who worked with him at his foundation finished his work and we licensed volume 3 from them.

NK: What other books have proved strong or bestsellers for you?

CF: By far our bestselling book beyond those poetry collections is a true crime title called I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt. It’s an extraordinary work of research, and a major contribution to American criminal and labour history. We’re still fighting sceptics because it includes a confession concerning the killing of Jimmy Hoffa, and there have been numerous theories about that event. He’s become part of our culture and the broad speculation and debate about his death reflects the fact that they haven’t yet found Jimmy Hoffa’s body. One of the things that bothers people about our book is that Frank Sheeran, a known mafia hitman whom Brandt spent five years interviewing, says, ‘I shot Jimmy Hoffa in the back of the head and I walked out the door. It wasn’t my job to be a cleaner or to dispose of the body, so I can’t tell you actually what happened to it, but I was told that the body was immediately taken away and cremated.’

NK: So this gives the lie to David Mamet’s script for Danny de Vito’s film Hoffa, which starred Jack Nicholson; and the earlier film, F.I.S.T., with Sly Stallone, for that matter.

CF: Yes, very much so. It gives the lie to all that stuff, and it upsets people, because they want to believe Jimmy Hoffa’s body is out there somewhere. The other thing that Sheeran said was that anybody other than the one of the two cleaners who’s still alive – and he names who they were, they were two brothers – who claims to know where Jimmy Hoffa’s body is, or what happened to that body, is making a sick joke. Because, he says, ‘I’m telling you, there were only two people in the world who were there to remove the body, and one of them is dead’. Since publishing the book in hardcover we’ve had plenty of people with vested interests in their own theories who have shot off about it all, and they get as much play in the media as our guy does.

NK: Do you have any other true crime books in the system?

CF: We have another true crime book in the works right now, A Criminal and an Irishman, that also involves two writers and a criminal, and the criminal is the source of the information. In this case though, the former criminal, Patrick Nee, gets the primary author credit, and his two co-authors helped him get his story down. And again it’s a book that tells a story of great newsworthiness that has never been told before. Those are the kind of true crime books I’m looking at. I’ve now got an education in organised crime and also in dealing with different types that I never ever imagined I would get when I went into publishing.

NK: When you say these are the books that have sold best for you, what kinds of sales, what numbers are we talking about?

CF: I Heard You Paint Houses has sold about 40,000 copies in hardcover and the paperback has sold about 20,000 to date and continues to sell very well. An earlier true crime title of ours, Street Soldier, sold I think 23,000 copies in hardcover, and sold about 14,000 paperback copies.

NK: I remember reading that you did very well in your first years with the re-publication of Dawn Powell’s books.

CF: Dawn Powell became the cornerstone of our backlist even though she was long dead and all of her novels that we published were reissues. It was an incredible rediscovery project and one that I can’t imagine we’ll ever duplicate. It’s just so rare for a writer that good and with such a large body of work to disappear so completely. She has now gone from being absolutely out of print in 1994 to inclusion in the Library of America with two hardcover volumes that they licensed from us in 2002. We also had the good fortune that Dawn left behind one of the all-time great writer’s diaries. We published The Diaries of Dawn Powell in 1995 to extraordinary widespread acclaim. It was a vehicle for getting her noticed. The Diaries might be her greatest book, but it never sold well for us. Rather, it got attention for Dawn which in turn drove the sales of her novels that we had brought out in paperback.

NK: The look of the book, the editing and the design, is this work done in-house or outsourced?

CF: We work with a number of developmental editors on a freelance basis. Our list is so broad that we couldn’t have enough editors in-house always to have the right fit for the projects that come in. Instead we find publishing opportunities and pair them with editors whose work we know.

As far as the look of our books is concerned, we have stuck from the beginning and for our first twelve years with one designer for all of our books, Louise Fili. Louise was the art director for Pantheon for eleven years when Andre Schiffrin was there, and she’s one of the best-known graphic designers in the world. One of her specialties is Italian design so she’s perfect for our Steerforth Italia series. She devised a beautiful look for that. One of the things that we liked about having a single designer was that our books had a very high-end trade look, and people noticed that immediately, from our very first BEA [Book Expo America]. There were designer groupies who would make a point of coming to our booth because they knew Louise was our designer. And in the early years we even had a strip on the side of our books that said ‘Steerforth’, because we were branding the company, urging readers to take a chance on a Steerforth book because, you know, it was bound to be a very good book even if you hadn’t heard of it before. We moved away from that because the strip, graphically, is limiting and when you’re trying to create a package that best reflects the book, you need to get the strip out of the way. So we don’t do that any more.

Louise has been tremendous in dealing with each book on its own terms. If you look at the designs for our new books, they could not be more different from one another, and the look that she came up with for each one of them is totally unique. All that said, in 2006 we started using other designers as well for the first time. Our list had gotten so big – 13 titles on the fall 2006 list alone – and her studio is so busy with so many other projects, that it made sense not to rely on her for everything we do. The Random House sales force which now represents our books typically has constructive criticism for changes or revisions to more than half our proposed book covers. To throw all of that work at Louise and say ‘and we need it tomorrow’ simply isn’t practical.

NK: You are now distributed by Random House. Has that arrangement brought any benefits to Steerforth?

CF: One thing that’s nice is, now that we’re distributed by Random, we go through the same process their imprints go through, which means that nine times a year I’m meeting with the sales force. We have three series of meetings for each of our three lists. The first meeting is a launch meeting where you are talking about the book, editorially. In the second meeting, the pre-sales meeting, you’re showing them your first pass at the covers, and sometimes the cover will be dramatically reworked based on the sales force’s response to it, and concerns about where the book is going to be shelved. For instance, for a book on family meals that we did in the fall of 2005, we originally had a look that was more evocative, people gathered around a table. But when the Random House rep said, ‘this book is not going to go into food writing, and it really doesn’t fit any of the memoir categories, it’s going to go into parenting, so it needs to be a cover that a parenting buyer is going to see and say, “I like that cover, that looks like a parenting book that will sell”’. We ended up dramatically changing the look of the cover based on that feedback.

NK: What happens at the third meeting?

CF: The entire sales force of more than 100 people gathers together in one room to hear Steerforth pitch its books. By that point we really have to have our act together regarding cover design, publicity plan etc. and then we have a good give and take that will give the reps the info they need to sell the book in the fifteen to thirty seconds, at most a minute, a buyer might give to them as they flip through the catalogue pages.

NK: It seems clear that issues of genre and sub-genre play out at this level of book design; all sorts of graphic design codes and conventions come into play.

CF: Yes. And on the one hand, when I ask the Random House sales force what they think of a cover, I almost always get the conventional response; what they want you to do is the safest bet. In some cases I will partially accept it or not accept it at all. But in many other cases I see exactly what they’re saying and I go for it. I’m mindful of the fact that here at Steerforth we’re not doing the conventional thing, our books really don’t fit the mould of what Random House imprints are doing; that’s how and why certain titles happened to end up on our list in the first place. And so I don’t want to take away from what makes our books different, I want to convey that. On the other hand, if they say to me, ‘look, when I take this to Barnes & Noble, or Borders, this is the buyer I’m going to be dealing with, here’s what she is like. I’m telling you that with that cover she’s going to take 300 copies, whereas she might take 2000 copies if you give her a cover like this.’ And if, when I hear that I buy into it, I go back to the designer, who responds accordingly. We are driven to a certain point by that. We used to be distributed by Publishers Group West, who still distribute Atlantic Monthly/Grove, Carroll and Graf and a host of other top independent publishers, and one of the stories I always keep in mind – it may have been generally told, or maybe I just heard it because we were in-house at PGW – concerns a Barnes & Noble buyer who allegedly saw the mock-up for Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, which is just blue on blue, sort of an outline of a mountain, and said, ‘you’ve got to have a Civil War scene on the cover or people aren’t going to know this is a Civil War novel’. And the publisher, Morgan Entrekin, said no, and they sold two million copies. He was right in not wanting to pigeonhole Cold Mountain as a Civil War book for Civil War buffs. But that was an uncommonly strong book that went on to win the National Book Award, and Atlantic Monthly had aggressively laid the groundwork and spent a lot of money to pre-position it for success. More and more I’m coming to appreciate how hard it is to get someone to pick up a book, and that the chain buyers really know their merchandising and we can learn a lot from listening to them and keeping an open mind.

NK: Didn’t Frazier leave that independent press after putting his next novel up for auction and receiving an offer of a very large sum of money from another publisher?

CF: Yes, but Atlantic Monthly was smart. They knew what they were doing. The amount of money he was paid was based on what I understand was a ten-page fiction proposal. It may be a great book and another monster bestseller, but that’s too big a risk to take, especially when you don’t have the cash reserves. Think of all the other things they could be doing with that money.

NK: I also read that Cold Mountain didn’t become an immediate bestseller. Rather it had a first printing of 25,000 copies and took off initially via independent bookstores, and then later via the chains.

CF: Right, exactly. Morgan Entrekin knew he had something special and spent an enormous amount of money taking the author around to twenty cities or something like that just to meet the booksellers, months and months before they were bringing the book out. He really built the foundation for that to become a bestseller.

NK: I liked the fact that when he won the National Book Award, up against DeLillo’s Underworld, among others, Frazier had a gracious statement about how, when he was first starting out as a writer and travelling around the US he was reading all of DeLillo’s early works, and how much they meant to him as a young, aspiring writer. How important have literary awards been to Steerforth, either in increasing sales or drawing wider public attention?

CF: We have won a number of awards for our books, but rarely have the awards led to a genuine spike in a book’s sales in the sense that it takes a book that would not have been profitable and makes it profitable. The sales pick-up is never that big. When you win an award, you might end up selling 2000 copies of a book that otherwise would have sold 900 copies, something like that. It does give some added notice to it. But we’ve never won any of the major awards. We haven’t won a National Book Award, a National Book Critics Circle or Pulitzer, anything like that, so it remains to be seen what the effect of winning a major, national award would be. But getting shortlisted for or winning a regional award, or even some PEN awards (like the PEN West award which we won), or a National Jewish Book Award, which we have also won – what that really does is get your name in circulation in such a way that you get an earlier look at a project that an agent might not previously have thought to send you. They see the announcement and notice that you’ve succeeded. The fact that we’d succeeded with a true crime book led to us receiving a lot of true crime submissions. The same thing can happen with any award for any book. The National Jewish Book Award we won led to people who follow that award sending us submissions.

NK: So publicity increases, but maybe not sales.

CF: Exactly. And as Alan was saying earlier about the partners knowing people who can send us interesting projects, we almost never end up signing a project that lands here after it’s been shopped every place else because we’ll reach the same conclusion that the other houses reached.

NK: What happened in the case of the deceased author, Sam Adams, and his book, War of Numbers?

CF: That was different. Tom Powers knew Sam, and Sam didn’t finish the book, so W.W. Norton didn’t publish it. But the book was there, almost finished, and so we did it. The projects that have done the best for us, or are most interesting, often have some problem attached to them. It might be like I Heard You Paint Houses where there was a problem with the earlier publishing house which cancelled the contract. In the case of Sam Adams, we ended up getting David Hackworth to write the foreword and be a spokesperson for the book. Hackworth is a huge-selling military author, so you can sort of get around the problem that way. There are other books we’ve done, where I can see why a large house would be reluctant: it might be messy, it might be politically incorrect, and other things that make it obvious to me that if I were working in a large house with a bureaucratic decision-making structure I would have problems taking this book on, independent of whether or not it’s going to sell. The big houses are not saying no simply because they think only 2,000 people in the world want to read it, they’re saying no because it doesn’t fit their mould, or because there are other complications with it. And when I say ‘bureaucratic,’ I don’t mean that in a disparaging way. We have lots of friends who are editors for the big publishing houses. As the large houses are gobbled up by larger entities, the only way to manage the operation is through bureaucratic models. As a result, editors are forced to operate in a more bureaucratic fashion, defending their decisions, saying, ‘the reason I did this book is our competition would have signed it if I hadn’t,’ or, ‘the reason I did this book is I thought it would sell like this other book that was such a success for us’. If they simply said, ‘I bought it because it was excellent writing,’ or, ‘I was using my own taste and judgement,’ they could lose their job. They tell us that that is the big change that has occurred in their workplaces. And at times they have been the sources for some of the more interesting projects that have come to us. Typically it would be a situation where they might have wanted to sign the book but sales and marketing said, ‘we don’t think we can sell enough copies,’ or the publisher said, ‘legally, I have problems with this book, I don’t want to expose us to that’. And then they’ve said to the author, ‘why don’t you try Steerforth, they might be more willing to take a risk, or to bring the project to market faster’.

NK: How many manuscripts do you receive a week?

CF: We try to limit the number of manuscripts that come in. We say on our website that we do not accept unsolicited manuscripts. We got an angry email from somebody who said, ‘have you ever really considered manuscripts or are you just publishing works by friends and family?’ It was from somebody who said he was looking into publishing companies that receive NEA grants. And I wrote him back and said, ‘first of all, we’re a commercial enterprise using private investor dollars, we neither seek nor do we accept nor are we even eligible for NEA grants or foundation grants or any other charitable dollars. And secondly, what we do is ask authors to send us query letters, saying, “this is what my book is, it might be of interest to you”. And then we might write back and invite them to submit the manuscript. So when we say no unsolicited submissions, we don’t mean you can’t write us, just don’t send us the whole manuscript until we’ve communicated with you on the basis of the inquiry letter.’ Nonetheless, people still go ahead and send us manuscripts, and of course that’s just how agents do it, they send us manuscripts. I would say we probably get 15–25 a week. And for a company that’s only doing 15–30 books a year, you can do the math, that means we say no to almost everything.

NK: Who reads what when these manuscripts come in?

CF: My own personal track record is much stronger at picking non-fiction projects, so that’s what I try to limit myself to. What I generally get most excited about is when I end up reading the manuscript and become so engaged I don’t want to stop reading it and I can’t help talking about it. I have to make sure that it’s by a writer who knows what he or she’s talking about. And then I have to do research about the competition. But I love it when a book comes along that isn’t in a subject area that I’m innately interested in and the author draws me in and I end up being engaged by it. The manuscript needs to have that quality, and on top of that it really needs to be newsworthy or to make a new contribution to a particular area of knowledge or interest. If it has those things, you can get a readership for it. If it is a superbly written memoir that doesn’t have those other attractions to it, well, we did a lot of those in the early years, and did not make money on any of them, and so we don’t do them any more. And that’s tough, but if I think there’s really no place in the store to shelve it, and there’s no way to get people to pay attention to it, then with those kinds of things, especially if the answer is no, I often make those determinations on my own. There’s no point in my asking Mike, Tom or Alan to read it if it’s a terrific memoir, and have them back me up and say, yes it is a terrifically written memoir, why don’t you publish it. And then I’d say, well the reason I’m not going to publish it is that I don’t think we can sell it. Rather than go through all that, I just say no.

Again and again and again, authors who have been rejected elsewhere will try to make appeals to me by saying, ‘my book came this close to being accepted here, or this close to being accepted there, or this famous editor had these nice things to say about it’. And what I generally say to authors is, ‘the editor was saying no to you, and quite often human beings will try to find a nice way to say no. But what you have to keep in mind is nobody has said yes’. And the other thing I say to them is, ‘if somebody tells you they might be interested in publishing if you changed it in this way, don’t listen to them unless you think they’re absolutely right, and it really connects with you. Otherwise they’re not saying yes. If they’re saying to you, “I’m willing to publish it if you’ll work together with me to change it in this way,” that’s a different story.’

NK: You have told me how Steerforth Italia emerged from Tom Powers’ interests, his scrutinising of his bookshelf and noting how many good books from or about Italy were out of print. How did Steerforth come to acquire Zoland Books? In a sense you are acquiring a backlist as you go along. And your best-selling Poem a Day books are listed as Zoland Books in your catalogue.

CF: Roland Pease, down in Cambridge Mass, is now our fiction and poetry editor. He was the publisher and editor of Zoland for fifteen years and we bought the Zoland list two and a half years ago. Roland has an excellent eye. He was the first person to publish Kevin Young, who has since been shortlisted for the National Book Award. He did another book of poetry, by Anne Porter, that was shortlisted for the National Book Award. She is the widow of the painter Fairfield Porter but he’d never sought to publish her poetry until after he died. We just published a second volume of her poems this year.

Zoland was a for-profit, privately-funded publishing house, but Roland had no interest in going beyond what he was personally passionate about, poetry and literary fiction. Year after year he was financially supporting the company, and after fifteen years the expense and all the stuff that he had to deal with in running a small business – contracts and personnel and royalty statements and everything else – he just didn’t want to do it any more. He wanted to spend more time with his family and there were too many parts of the job that he didn’t find all that enjoyable. He’s a poet and he wanted more time for his own writing as well.

And he contacted me, or I guess somebody who was helping him unwind the company contacted me, and said, ‘Roland suggested I call you to let you know we’re in the process of reverting the rights to almost all of our books. We’ve got about a dozen titles that are really productive backlist titles, and Roland hates the idea of just letting the rights revert to those, because he’s the one who took the financial risk on them, he found them, he got them where they are today, and he’s wondering if you had any thoughts on what we might do.’ I was going down to Boston two days later so I said, ‘well I’m coming down to Boston, why don’t I come talk to you?’ And basically we decided to acquire Zoland, which by then would simply be those twelve titles. So I went down to meet with Roland Pease and I said there’s no reason Steerforth can’t keep these dozen titles in print. Roland now gets a share of the net profits those books generate, without having to contribute more money to print more copies when needed, and without having to deal with a distributor or worry about catalogues or anything like that.

And then after he was out of the game for less than two years, he called me again and said, ‘the one thing I always loved about publishing and that I really miss is reading manuscripts, would you have any use for me?’ And I said, ‘well, our fiction list is dwindling right now, because I’m not acquiring fiction myself. Mike, Tom and Alan have lots of other things they do with their time, and we have also found that lots of the fiction we acquired that we admired and that got great reviews, didn’t sell very well. So we’re reluctant to publish at the moment, we’re saying no to lots of books we would have said yes to a few years ago. So it means very little fiction is making it on to our list.’ Roland has a tremendous track record in picking fiction. He’s a fast reader, and he loves going through a stack of manuscripts, which is something that I don’t have the patience for. That’s why I’m much better with non-fiction because, if it’s a proposal, I can immediately pick up on the seriousness of the writer and the qualities of the story that will make it a hit or not. And so we have two novels on our fall list that were both selected by Roland and a novel and a book of poetry on our spring list. And I think he’s gone through about 300 manuscripts to pick out these four. He has a terrific track record, he has very good taste, and he’s also made some choices that have turned out to be quite popular as well.

NK: Can you give me an indication of what print runs you do?

CF: On the print runs our criteria have changed through the years. Initially we were doing smaller print runs and, in many cases, even those were far too many. The smallest print run you can do economically and have the unit cost be at the price point where you’re actually going to make some money on your sales, or not lose money on your sales, is about 3000. But then you can end up selling only 800 copies, which we did with some books.

NK: I read that anecdote where you were meeting with an author and you announce your intended print run, and she says she has never sold more than 250 or so. And you say it made your blood run cold.

CF: That was Diana Athill’s Make Believe: A True Story, on our very first list. We sold about 500 copies of that title, something like that. She was one of the founders of Andre Deutsch and had been a publisher for decades, and she warned us. But we would publish it again. Actually, it was just reissued by The New York Review of Books book imprint. These days I would say the smallest print run we ever want to do is maybe 6,000 copies for a book that we really think we can sell 5,000 copies of and not ever run the risk of only selling 1,000. I think the largest first printing we’ve ever done was 35,000 copies, for I Heard You Paint Houses. These days I would say our first printings typically are 6-12,000. In the early years, most of our print runs were 5,000 or under, so that has changed over time.

NK: What is the most expensive ingredient for you in the cost of putting a book out?

CF: The thing that drives cost the most is page count. It’s the paper that you’re paying for. And so total printing costs can run anywhere from a dollar a book to three dollars a book with a paperback. And a hardcover is probably anywhere from $2.50 a book to $4 a book.

NK: Are there other small presses, independent presses, that you admire or whose activities you find analogous to what you are trying to do with Steerforth?

CF: Seven Stories Press, and Ecco, which is now owned by Harper Collins. Dan Halpern, who was the publisher all along, is the publisher of Ecco at Harper Collins, and now has a healthy acquisitions budget and is doing big-time books under the Ecco imprint.

NK: Gabriel Zaid’s recent So Many Books gives devastating statistical information showing that far more people write books than read books. What things have changed most in the book business over the twelve years you have been involved with Steerforth?

CF: Things definitely have changed. Not only is reading becoming a less central part of our culture, which is something everybody has had to deal with, but lots of the things that might have been of tremendous interest to Tom, Mike and Alan twenty, thirty years ago might not be of tremendous interest to people today. They would get very excited about a book because it would say something new about a field in which they were interested and they would think, well this must be of interest to other people. And then it would turn out that the book didn’t succeed commercially, even though we got lots of good credit and recognition for making a new contribution to whatever the field was. So that was difficult, there was a lot of finding our way.

On changes in publishing, I would say the biggest change is how we determine whether or not to acquire a book. In the early years we were much more idealistic in the sense we were hearing from so many old guard editors in New York and so many established writers, that in their chase for bestsellers the large conglomerated publishers were saying no to many books that ten years earlier they would have said yes to; and we thought that that presented us with an opportunity. And so anything that was so good or so important that it ought to be a book we were going to go ahead and publish. And that served us well because Tom, Mike and Alan were the editorial board in those first few years and they were well-qualified to pass judgement on whether or not something really ought to be a book, whether it had a sense of urgency and whether the quality of the work was there. We went about doing things that way, and I think we established an excellent reputation and accrued a lot of goodwill. Not only were our books of superior quality but they also didn’t smack of the experimentalism or the secondary talent of some of the not-for-profit literary publishing houses that might be less discriminating or not as well connected. Their job as not-for-profit was to do the experimental stuff or the less commercial stuff, whereas we were somewhere in between those guys and the big houses. And I think that set us apart, and helped us faster than any of us had even hoped to establish the Steerforth name as standing for something of quality. That was very important, and I think that even as we’ve moved away from it, that is something that we’ve built upon, and we still try to nurture that idea.

NK: How have you moved away from that original idea or orientation?

CF: We still think a book needs to be excellent and important for what it is, but we also have to have a very clear idea of who’s going to buy it and read it, and how we can get the world to pay attention to it. So today there are many books that we will read and say, that’s so good it ought to be a book but we can’t figure out how we’re going to sell it so we’re going to have to say no.

NK: Do you then pass those books onto other presses that have other emphases, for example, the not-for-profits and the academic presses?

CF: Occasionally I will. I don’t want another editor or publisher to think that I’m trying to fob off an author at their expense. I might get an excellent biography about a political figure, or a novel that is of particular Jewish interest or other ethnic interest, and I’ll say, ‘I don’t think we can sell this well enough but I know that this particular university press has a program that has an endowment to do books in this subject area, so I would suggest you try there’. And I do try to steer people in those directions, especially if it’s one of those books that we think really deserves to be a book. If it doesn’t work at that level, I don’t steer them any place else, I just say no.

NK: One further question about the publishing situation now and the various changes you have witnessed over the years with Steerforth, and bearing in mind you pointed out how Vermont/New Hampshire can seem remote and yet is only four or five hours from New York – what do you make of the news that Judith Regan says she is leaving New York for Los Angeles, implying by that that one no longer needs to be in New York to be at the centre of US publishing?

CF: Well, she’s successful enough, and was already bridging the sort of mixed media divide well enough that agents will seek her out whether they’re having lunch with her on a daily basis or not. So I think what she’s doing makes perfect sense…for her. Some independent presses are in New York but mostly they’re from all over the country and with email and FedEx you can be just about anywhere. Some of the illustrated novels or manga or whatever, those might be better off in L.A., their agents and authors don’t need to be eating with people in New York necessarily. But I need to be in New York and Washington and a few other places simply because there is such a crush of good books vying for attention. When I go meet with the book review editor of the Washington Post or the New York Times, the most valuable service I am providing is putting the book on his or her desk. Because if it comes through the mailroom, who knows what happens to that package and where it’s going to wind up? The face-to-face meetings are important simply to get people to take a moment and focus on what we are doing. As far as the dynamics within the big houses are concerned, I think they are the same today as they were twelve years ago, even more so, in the sense that the rules are clearer now to the editors and the salespeople who have remained or have come in subsequently. There was definitely a time when there was a lot of friction, where people were trying to find out how much responsibility they would have in the new regime, and there were shake outs when people left, and those people who stayed, stayed with certain understandings or accommodations, and they know how it’s done. And because those lines are more clearly set, we’re also getting a better sense of where the big guys’ blind spots are going to be, and that’s where we’re looking for books. So even though we’re now shelved next to their books, and the Random House sales reps are representing our books, and our catalogues get circulated in the same boxes as the catalogues of the Random House imprints, the books that we end up picking up are books that we’re getting because they’re in the big guys’ blind spots, or we’re structuring deals in a manner different from what the big guys would be interested in doing. We’re never getting into a bidding war with a big house over a book, it just doesn’t play out that way. And I think that, editorially, that’s always going to be what’s going to work for us and what makes sense. Otherwise we’d be better off becoming an imprint of a large house and using their resources and signing books in the same way everyone else does.

NK: How many equivalent full-time people work at Steerforth?

CF: That’s another one of the things that has changed a bit in the sense that here in the office there are three full-time, but we also have a managing editor who used to be in the South Royalton office. She lives over in Pittsfield, Vermont, and it would be an hour each way for her to come here, so she has set up a home office. So that’s a staff of four. I’ve already mentioned that we use outside designers for our covers, and we do the same for interiors. It’s the same thing with the developmental editors whom we hire. None of them is a full-time employee, but we are set up so that we can expand and contract as opportunities present themselves, and be in a position to bring to the market in a really robust way various projects as they come along. We have scaled back our overheads in the last two years as far as full-time staff goes so that we wouldn’t ever feel the pressure to put out a particular number of titles in a given year. If we do 15 in one year and 25 in the next year, we can handle it, because we don’t have those fixed costs. Of course our costs expand dramatically for 25 or 30 titles, but it’s temporary.

And so that’s the staff. The partners are a whole separate thing, Tom, Mike, Alan and me. Tom and Alan’s roles have not changed from the very start. They’re engaged in our periodic strategic meetings and they really add value to the company by working their contacts and either bringing projects in actively or simply being there to catch them when someone says, ‘you should talk to Tom Powers,’ or ‘you should talk to Alan Lelchuk’. Mike is the only one of the partners whose role has changed over time in that he started out having a day-to-day active role, and now has a role more of the sort that Tom and Alan started out with.

NK: Your latest venture, which received a fair amount of attention in the news, is a co-publishing arrangement with Playboy magazine. Please explain how that came to pass and what it entails.

CF: Hugh Hefner has quipped that without the playmates he would have a literary magazine, and if you look at the names that have written for Playboy over fifty years and the range of topics that have been covered, there’s a lot of truth to that. Even though people might think of Playboy and Steerforth as two very different outfits, editorially we have a lot in common. I got to know the editors of the magazine as a result of the books and authors we have published. Playboy reviewed some of our novels, then excerpted a couple of nonfiction works and assigned an original article to Charles Brandt, author of I Heard You Paint Houses. One day I was in their New York office and executive editor Lee Froelich broached the topic of Playboy Press, a book imprint that ceased publishing in 1982 but that had once had a very robust program. Lee said that Playboy had no interest in gearing up to publish books again, but rather than strictly licensing off editorial content to a variety of publishers as it had been doing the past twenty-plus years, it would like to have the option to co-publish titles under its old imprint. Steerforth of course was in a position to bring books to market through Random House, and the kinds of books Lee had in mind would actually be a good fit for Steerforth. They were words-on-paper, not photo books, and by real writers. Our inaugural season includes three titles: The New Bedside Playboy, featuring fiction, journalism, essays and humour by the likes of Jane Smiley, Gabriel García Marquez, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Chabon, Woody Allen and so on; Sexual Pensées is an erotic but also quite literary work by Bruce Jay Friedman, an extremely accomplished and versatile man of letters; and finally, Dear Playboy Advisor is a very helpful, well researched and reasoned, collection of pieces from Playboy’s monthly advice column. In the mid-1990s Playboy licensed a collection of Advisor pieces to Plume, which sold more than 100,000 copies.

This is a true co-publishing deal, with both sides sharing in the responsibilities and decision-making, and it suits both of us very well in that neither Playboy nor Steerforth needs to add overhead to make the arrangement work. Rather, we both go about our business and when, from time to time, we mutually agree that content from Playboy or a writer with a close relationship to the magazine has the makings of a strong Playboy Press title, we’ll publish it. Moving forward, my guess is we’ll do only two or three Playboy Press titles per year. The next one on tap for the spring of 2007 is The Playboy Book of True Crime.