Given how many calories most writers burn worrying about promoting and selling their books, it's interesting to consider Noam Chomsky. Known for critiques of U.S. foreign policy that either fascinate or appall, the MIT professor and activist has produced two bestsellers in the past year and a half, and one of the biggest-selling backlists of any living political writer, amounting to millions of copies sold in the U.S. and abroad. Yet he eschews many of the practices of modern bestselling authors.
Although he speaks internationally about politics, Chomsky refuses to do standard book publicity tours or readings, and resists anything that strikes him as self-promotion. In fact, he has rarely sought the publication of his political books: most have been solicited by editors and like-minded activists. While he's committed to getting his message out, advances, contract negotiations and the relative prestige of his publishers are of little concern to him.
To Chomsky, publishing is an extension of his activism. During the past five decades, he has contracted directly with more than 60 publishers worldwide, and his byline has appeared on more than 100 books, from scholarly works on linguistics and politics to collections of his lectures, interviews and essays. André Schiffrin, former managing director at Pantheon, which published many of Chomsky's early political books during the 1970s and '80s, remembered times when Chomsky chose to publish books with tiny publishers rather than with the imprint at Random House. "Noam wanted to help some of the smaller presses," Schiffrin said. "He gave them books to support them."
Ironically, the diffusion of Chomsky's work among a variety of publishers in many ways helped it reach a wider audience. Though Chomsky earned his reputation and a loyal contingent of fans in the 1970s and '80s with his linguistics titles and a number of dense political books, it was the short, cheap, reader-friendly paperbacks published by start-up presses in the 1990s that broadened his audience in both independent and chain bookstores. After the September 11 attacks, when many people felt compelled to seek alternatives to traditional media sources, Chomsky's controversial political works 9-11 (Seven Stories, 2001) and Power and Terror: Post 9-11 Talks and Interviews (Seven Stories, 2003) became mainstream bestsellers.
The precursors to 9-11 and Power and Terror can be traced back to 1991, when Greg Ruggiero was the first to publish pamphlets of Chomsky's lectures and distribute them nationally in his Open Media Pamphlet Series. He initially sold or traded the folded, 8"×11" pamphlets—designed for easy photocopying—on New York street corners, before contacting independent bookstores around the country and selling tens of thousands of copies that way. In 1995, he brought the series to Seven Stories Press.
Also in the early 1990s, Arthur Naiman heard Chomsky talk on the radio and recognized that he was more accessible as a speaker than as a writer. Already the small publisher of a series of computer books, Naiman started an imprint of short, mass market—sized political books, the Real Story series from Odonian Press, under which he published four short paperbacks by Chomsky between 1992 and 1998. As of the end of 2002, his Chomsky titles have sold an average of 118,000 copies each.
Chomsky's recent success is all the more remarkable given that his political nonfiction is often considered too radical to be reviewed or featured in U.S. newspapers and magazines, though a recent New Yorker profile was a significant exception. This October, Metropolitan Books will publish the first book written by Chomsky in the 21st century, Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Domination, as part of the forthcoming American Empire Project, which features short, argument-driven books from leading writers and thinkers. But whether or not the book garners a new level of critical attention, the imprint's associate publisher, Sara Bershtel, expects the book will sell well. "He has something to say that people can't hear anywhere else," she said.
