Confronted by a one-two punch of soft sales and declines in funding, the New Press has implemented companywide austerity measures that has reduced the number of employees by about nine—from a staff of under 30 to one of under 20—and has caused the nonprofit publisher to also furlough other employees. “There isn’t an employee here who hasn’t been affected by the downsizing in some way,” Diane Wachtell, cofounder and executive director of the press told PW. “It’s been an incredibly painful process.”
She said while sales have been soft, the largest loss of funds has come from contributions. Donations make up about one-third of the New Press’ total income and those funds go straight to the bottomline, Wachtell explained. As government funding to nearly all major nonprofit organizations has dried up, large foundations have pivoted to support them, leaving less, or no, money for organizations like the New Press, Wachtell said. She noted that the New Press receives no funding from the federal government, and has never received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The decline in sales is due to two factors, Wachtell said: the banning of mostly progressive books that has intensified under the Trump administration and, a bit surprisingly to Wachtell, the lack of a sales uptick for books that explain what is happening in America now. The New Press had its best financial year ever in 2020 amid the rise of the Black Lives Matters movement, when sales for titles like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow soared, lifting sales to a record high of $8.6 million. No such sales boom surrounding the current administration has happened yet, though the New Press has had recent success with Elie Mystal’s Bad Law, which spent two weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list, and Arlie Russell Hochschild's Stolen Pride, which was released last fall, named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and continues to sell.
Wachtell acknowledged that she is somewhat dumbfounded that all the controversial moves Trump has taken hasn’t resulted in a jump in the sales of books that help put the administration’s actions in context. “It looks like, at least for now, readers are turning to escapist books rather than to books that try to explain what is happening,” she said. Wachtell also knocked down the theory that book banning increases the sales of those banned books, saying that has certainly not been the case for the New Press. She noted that three of books recently banned by the Defense Department are published by the New Press.
Wachtell said the current austerity measures do not include reducing the number of titles it acquires or publishes. She expressed frustration that a number of what the New Press calls “A” titles—books expected to sell 10,000 titles—have fallen short of that target. She feels sure that a turnaround in the overall environment is coming, but, like so much else connected to Trump, the timing is uncertain: “Will it be in the mid-terms? Will we have to wait another three years?”
In the meantime, the New Press has implemented a few programs it hopes will stop the sales slide. The most notable is the launch of a direct-to-consumer option on its website, the implementation of which was overseen by Mary Beth Jarrad, who was named publisher last October following the retirement of Ellen Adler. Jarrad joined the New Press from NYU Press where she was director of sales and marketing and gained experience working at a publisher with a tight budget.
In addition to giving a boost to sales, the new DTC website has allowed the New Press to grow its list of potential donors, and the press is using that list in a new fundraising effort to individual donors. An appeal has gone out over the last few days highlighting the “dire financial straits” the press finds itself in and asking for contributions.
Wachtell, who cofounded the New Press in 1992 with André Schiffrin, stressed that all the actions that have been taken are aimed at carrying the progressive publisher into the future.
