In an age when huge, conglomerate publishers are scrambling for shares in the industry, how do small presses with minimal budgets -- even voluntary staff -- survive in today's competitive bookselling market? Three Western publishers, each thriving and celebrating anniversaries this year -- Kelsey Street Press in Berkeley, Calif., Johnson Books in Boulder, Colo., and Avec Books in Pengrove, Calif. -- stand as role models for independent publishers. And all have been honored with major national awards for their authors.
Kelsey Street Press is celebrating its 25th anniversary on the heels of author Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge's Western State Book Award. According to Heather Peeler, executive director of Small Press Distribution in Berkeley, which distributes both Kelsey Street and Avec, the awards are vital.
"Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge is one of our bestselling authors, and she's a p t," said Peeler. Kelsey Street's awards have translated into sales. The publicity and momentum provide a marketing route most small presses cannot afford. They bring acclaim, prestige and, most important, free publicity.
With its nonsalaried staff, Kelsey Street, which publishes three or four titles annually, can boast of authors receiving the America Award for Literature, the Asian-American Writers Award for P try and the Frost Medal -- all in the past three years. In addition, the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley purchased Kelsey Street's archives this year, attesting to the literary importance of the press's backlist.
Rena Rosenwasser and Patricia Dienstfrey founded Kelsey Street with four other women in 1974 as a nonprofit literary press. At the time, women writers, including women of color and lesbian writers, had little outlet for their work. "There was an explosion of feminist presses in the ˜70s," noted Rosenwasser, "but Kelsey Street is the only literary entity that has survived intact to the present."
Johnson Books' author Merrill Gilfillan garnered WESTAF's nonfiction award for Chokecherry Places (Bookselling, June 14) just in time for the press's 20th anniversary. A division of Johnson Publishing, a printing company founded by Raymond Johnson in Boulder in 1946, Johnson Books was launched by daughter Barbara Johnson Mussil in 1979.
Johnson Books publishes 10 to14 titles a year, focusing on outdoor recreation and environmental topics, with annual revenues slightly more than $1 million. Books are sold by commissioned reps throughout the U.S. and Canada.
Johnson Books has one imprint, Spring Creek Books, and distributes several other presses. Long considered a regional press, in recent years it has expanded its lists to become more mainstream and to better compete with other regional publishers. The disappearance of so many independent booksellers and small wholesalers, as well as the emergence of the chains, has also inspired Johnson Books to enhance its national appeal. Editorial director Steve Topping, who previously worked for Crown Publishing, joined the company in 1995 to help with the expansion and focus on people and places of the West.
Cydney Chadwick founded Avec Books in 1992, three years after the launch of Avec's literary journal. Its first title, Periplum by Peter Gizzi, won the Lannon Younger P ts Award from the Academy of American P ts. This year, p t Michelle Murphy's first book, Jackknife & Light, was shortlisted for the 1999 PEN West award and was also recently commissioned and performed by the Nestling Dolls dance troupe at the ODC Dance Company in San Francisco. (Kelsey Street also crosses genres in its author promotions, most recently with an exhibition at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Arts Center.)
With 18 titles in print, Avec ceased publishing its journal in 1995. In an innovative move, Chadwick began to publish the Avec Sampler instead. "It's an anthology, a sampling of contemporary writing with approximately 10 pages per contributor," explained Chadwick. The press has received grants from the California Art Council and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others. With funding for the arts becoming more difficult to obtain, however, Chadwick is focusing on expanding Avec's Web site with audio files of author readings. The site receives 2000 hits per month from 19 countries. Avec is also increasing its public presence by organizing large-scale readings for its authors in New York City and California.
"We have a long way to go, and it's a constant struggle," Chadwick told PW. "But when I began, the naysayers told me Avec couldn't survive doing first-book authors and innovative writing. I'm proving them wrong."
