Tropen: Books 2.0
by Steven Zeitchik -- Publishers Weekly, 7/12/2004
Let’s start with the good news: Michael Zoellner, the co-founder of Cologne-based micro-publisher Tropen Verlag, has a fantastic set of indie-publisher antennae—so effective that he inexpensively picked up the German rights to Jonathan Lethem.
Unfortunately, there’s bad news. Along with those antennae, Zoellner also has an indie publisher’s wallet, which means he has to do the translation for Lethem’s latest—the densely written, 500-page The Fortress of Solitude—himself.
Okay, so he probably could have scraped together a few euros and hired someone. But the fact that he chooses, as a colleague noted, to “enter a tunnel” and work on it himself says a lot. He has a sense of fun—and playful recklessness—as he perfects what might be called kamikaze publishing. With his shaved head and a wicked deadpan demeanor, the 30-something art student–turned–publisher helps run, especially in the case of his Carbon Copy imprint, the oddest of publishing ducks: books for people who don’t read.
Zoellner and partner Christian Ruzicska launched the house in the late ’90s with the idea of doing some fiction, but with a much more radical vision that would be welcome, if somewhat suicidal, to the Reading-at-Riskers of the NEA. The way Tropen figures it, there are a lot more nonreaders than readers, so why not go with the bigger audience?
The name (which translates as tropes) has the requisite irony: the house ignores conventional ideas about readers and rests its hopes on hacker books and graphically striking tip-books from skater Tony Hawk and dirt biker Matt Hoffman.
Despite a literary streak (Jim Carroll and a Beat collection are also on the list), Tropen unashamedly gives thought to locating market first and books second. “You need to find a scene,” said the house’s Joern Damkroger. “You can’t pick something that people do for a year and then forget about.”
That Tropen is a foreign publisher helps. Translations are one way to buy a big name for a small amount; Lethem was a bargain because, paradoxically, he already made it in the U.S.
Still, that it’s happening in Germany, a place where publishers of any respectability are more likely to use “important” than “sales” in talking about their lists, is impressive. Has it worked? “The problem is not the public,” said Damkroger. “It’s the bookstores. These books are bestsellers and they still don’t store them.”
