melville house publishing
brooklyn - based publisher melville house will open a british publishing company in london called melville house uk .
glassdoor gives you an inside look at what it' s like to work at melville house publishing, including salaries, reviews, office photos, and more. this is the melville house publishing company profile. all content is posted anonymously by employees working at melville house publishing .
at melville house publishing' s blog, an... - franklin park reading series | facebook
valerie merians and dennis johnson of melville house: successful small publishers in a conglomerate world .
the founders of the us independent publisher melville house are to open a london - based publishing business with the aim of forming a “distinctly british company” .
the founders of the us independent publisher melville house are to open a london - based publishing business with the aim of forming a “distinctly british ...
melville house publishing is an independent publisher of literary fiction, non - fiction, and poetry. founded in 2001 by dennis loy johnson and valerie merians .
the head of a small publishing house in manhattan, mr. lynn reports, was even more blunt :
, which has done “sensationally well, ” as johnson says, and also became melville house’s first e - book .
creator of mobylives, one of the world’s first and most well - known book blogs, dennis johnson, put his fictional and journalistic careers on standby back in 2001 to launch melville house, an independent publishing house located in brooklyn, new york .
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dlj: if they can’t send money, buy melville house books, at an indie bookstore, or at a kgb bar event .
melville house publishing is an independent publisher of literary fiction, non - fiction, and poetry. they were founded in 2002 by dennis loy johnson and valerie merians, and are based in hoboken, new jersey. wikipedia *
that was a decade after johnson’s first spat with amazon, when melville house’s books were pulled from the site completely until johnson paid what he referred to as “a bribe. ” more recently, he and the team at melville house have spent plenty of time tweeting and blogging criticisms of amazon’s new physical bookstores, which they take issue with because they’re run algorithmically and don’t employ booksellers. at the london book fair in march, johnson live tweeted the pitiful traffic to amazon publishing’s booth, which some weirdo decided to set up directly across from melville house’s .
top: valerie merians and dennis johnson, founding proprietors of melville house, photographed by gaetano cavelli; below, their bookshop and office in dumbo, brooklyn .
dlj: the next piece of fiction we’re publishing came from the slush pile .
publishing books of literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and liking it .
this was not the first time amazon had used this stratagem. the retailer’s executives had previously cut off small firms such as ten speed press and melville house publishing for bucking their will. but the fight with macmillan was by far the most public of these showdowns .
“the publishing industry had its first opportunity to fight the trump administration and it failed miserably. ”
dennis johnson, co - founder and co - publisher of melville house books and one of the first book bloggers, is possibly best known for the fight he picked in the spring of 2014 .
that' s what got people saying it' s time to stand up to this and try to do something ,
says dennis johnson of melville house publishing. johnson, who has long been a vocal critic of amazon, characterizes the book industry as
a very timid industry .
dennis johnson co - founded the us company with valerie merians in 2001, as an activist publishing effort aimed at opposing the bush administration. the duo will now open a uk publisher, with the intention of responding to demand for melville house titles in britain, as well as growing a new list .
ellie robins is a translator from spanish and has worked in publishing in the us and the uk .
“we’re just doing something that all the great, famous american publishing houses did at their beginnings. ”
melville house is now publishing about 60 books per year; still, attempting to define what typifies a melville house book is a bit tricky for the couple. merians and johnson cited categories ranging from investigative journalism and politics to history and literary fiction. translations and repackaged public domain classics are also mainstays. the house even does some cookbooks. their list, they said, is a reflection of their “interests and tastes. ” the staff they have assembled includes two other editors, one person dedicated to indie bookseller outreach, and another dedicated solely to overseeing the company’s web site, which has morphed from johnson’s original blog into mhpbooks. com .
melville house celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time. forty novellas are currently available—and can be yours for only $ 288 .
a new edition of bulgakov' s blistering satire about the great russian director stanislavski, inventor of
method acting ,
part of melville house' s reissue of the bulgakov backlist in michael glenny' s celebrated translations .
in 2002. babes in the tangled wood of modern publishing, they stumbled in and never left. when the
the results of a new survey to measure diversity in publishing, released last week by the children’s publisher lee & low, loudly concur with díaz’s point. but interestingly, publishing isn’t just white: it’s dominated by white women .
one good sign is that the melville house series has spawned some imitators - - most notably, penguin uk' s
mini modern classics
series. these are clearly inspired by—if not a total ripoff of—the melville house editions. the series' cover layout, streamlined design, and single - color covers are an obvious nod to its antecedent. surely, interest in mid - length stories from a major publisher is a sign of good things for the form .
the first issue of tin house magazine arrived in the spring of 1999, the singular lovechild of an eclectic literary journal and a beautiful glossy magazine. n 2002, tin house ventured into the world of book publishing as an imprint with bloomsbury. in 2005, the independent press tin house books was launched, spearheaded by editorial director lee montgomery, tin house books publishes a dozen titles a year, and its authors have garnered attention from the new york times, the los angeles times, the wall street journal, and o, the oprah magazine .
one important aspect of melville house’s non - virtual books is that they look terrific. in the tradition of great paperback series such as the original penguins, mhp has created several uniform series with very simple but clear and clean designs—some, like their
kgb: you said that when you published what we do now, a collection of essays by literary voices and cultural figures on ways to respond to bush’s 2004 reelection, it made you realize that there is a place and a need for independent publishing. i’m wondering if that’s one of the reasons why you founded melville house, which grew out of your blog, moby lives. is publishing something that you had wanted to become involved in from the beginning? dlj: it was all her idea .
the verge sat down with johnson and melville house’s director of marketing and publicity, julia fleischaker, to talk about amazon, trump, the internet’s warped idea of “censorship, ” and how to build a brand centered on, of all things, anger .
mr. lynn reports on a conversation with the head of one of the largest publishing houses in the u. s. :
yes, i would like to receive newsletters from penguin random house canada with promotions and the latest on books and authors .
“our goal is to feature hilarious, fascinating, off - beat, and quirky content…to present these classic titles in fresh new ways while embracing digital as a whole, demonstrating that digital and print can exist together. ” — dennis loy johnson, publisher, melville house
vm: i also think word has gotten out to foreign publishers that we’re publishing—we’re getting a lot of foreign projects pitched to us .
” (key excerpts at link, full article by subscription) barry lynn views the state of book publishing through a different lens .
mobylives was one of the world’s first and most well - known book blogs, founded by dennis johnson in 2000 and based upon his syndicated newspaper column about books (the original mobylives). mobylives now resides on the melville house site covering all aspects of the book business .
urltoken is sponsored by the association of american publishers, the leading trade association for the u. s. book and journal publishing industry .
on the c - span networks: the melville house publishing has 8 videos in the c - span video library; the first program was in a 2008, [ i could tell you but then you would have to be destroyed by me ]. the year with the highest average number of views per program was 2015 with an average of 1, 565 views per program. most appearances with dennis loy johnson (4) .
melville publishing is trying to develop a number of products to help booksellers. one of them is the
shelf talker ,
a digital display that helps customers browse through print books in a brick - and - mortar store but buy e - books from that store' s website instead of amazon .
the knopf doubleday publishing group: alfred a. knopf, doubleday, nan a. talese, vintage, anchor, pantheon, schocken, everyman’s library
the coolest bit of online wizardry so far may be their hybridbooks series. these include some of mhp’s classic short stories and novellas, such as herman melville’s own
black, ceramic mugs sporting, on the front, the phrase that made bartleby the scrivener famous, and, on the back, the melville house logo. beautifully crafted and well - balanced with an ergonomically designed handle for maximum holding, this is the only 13 oz. mug you’ll ever need .
i’ve seen on tumblr that there are a lot of teenagers posting about the novella subscription series — i think because they’re so aesthetically appealing. and i noticed that you guys experimented a little bit with vine before it died. do you have a lot of young people who are interested in melville house ?
you’re pretty well known on twitter for the “fights” you pick with other publishing houses. can you tell me whose idea that was, how it started ?
still, melville house released their first five novellas, in print runs of 3, 000, in 2004. henry james' s
the lesson of the master ,
anton chekhov' s
my life ,
leo tolstoy' s
the devil ,
and a forgotten edith wharton gem called
the touchstone
were the first four. the fifth book was the herman melville classic
bartleby, the scrivener ,
available on its own for the first time .
but that was just devastating to me the first time around. i' m going up the
new york times
bestseller list and they don' t have enough books. this time, the people of melville house have been extraordinary in their understanding of how you market a book and get people to buy it .
melville house co - publisher dennis johnson, a fierce and relentless amazon critic, wrote that nelson’s new job “was another one of those stories that take the wind out of your sails: a beloved book industry champion was going to work for the company doing so much damage to the industry and book culture at large. ”
johnson and merians spoke with me at length about the challenges of independent publishing, their fondness for french literature, and how they hope to revive an older, more sustainable model of publishing where authors perceive publishers as collaborators rather than enemies. johnson and merians are unlikely publishers - - he is a literary journalist and she an artist and poet; neither had anticipated entering the book business before founding melville house. fueled by a passion for literature and steered by their keen taste, their recent successes reflect their vision and hard work and illustrate how backing books you believe in is still relevant and, to quote merians, “a lot more fun. ”
the press’s biggest hit, to date, is another translation: hans fallada’s every man dies alone. the novel, written by a german author who died in the late 1940s, was inspired by an actual couple who dispersed antifascist notes throughout berlin as the nazis were coming to power. the book had never before appeared in english, and it has sold over 100, 000 copies in the u. s. ; melville house licensed the paperback rights to penguin. (penguin has since swooped in to acquire a number of titles by fallada, though melville house has three others by the author on its list, all of which it recently reissued. )
now the beleaguered genre, at long last, has found a worthy and consistent champion: melville house publishing, whose
art of the novella
series is an ongoing celebration of the form. the brooklyn - based press offers 47—and counting—novellas from writers like cervantes, jane austen, anton chekhov, joseph conrad, mark twain, and virginia woolf. specifically drawing attention to the novella' s brevity, diversity, and lineage of distinguished practitioners, the series is the first of its kind .
the future of the contemporary novella may lie with a melville house initiative called hybridbooks. these editions pair each short book with a generous collection of digital supplements, called illuminations, available through a qr code on the final page. take
bartleby ,
for instance: illuminations include correspondence related to the story, excerpts from the philosophy that melville cites, maps of early wall street, illustrations of 1850s new york, a contemporaneous ad for a scrivener, and so on—almost 300 pages of supplemental material .
dlj: it’s a lot more fun to be more involved with your book. once i asked stephen dixon how this is working out for him, how he thought about working with melville house. he said he loved it because it was the first time in his career that he’s been able to get the publisher on the phone .
in its early days, melville house not only bet against the prevailing wisdom that novellas can' t sell—they wagered that novella sales could be the driving engine of their brand and business .
it was greeted as a really numbskull idea by our sales team ,
co - founder dennis loy johnson told me, in an interview .
i’ve been following your “publishing during wartime” series, because we’ve also had to cover some of these issues, particularly as it pertains to the alt - right and the strange, willful ignorance people have about what “censorship” and “free speech” actually mean. what do you think the publishing industry’s role is, going into the next four years ?
“it’s the one piece of the publishing puzzle that i haven’t yet done in my career, so it seemed like it was time to do it, ” she told me .
johnson likes to champion the long - shot, the underdog, the also - ran. his company is named for herman melville, the great american novelist who very nearly never was: moby - dick was first in a string of supreme critical failures, and melville died obscure and penniless. johnson' s website mobylives. com, which has since been subsumed into mhpbooks. com, was one of the internet' s first book blogs. its title suggests that hope springs eternal for literary culture .
the whale survived, unlike his detractors, who had harpoons ,
johnson wrote on the
about
page .
similarly, the literary arts will survive, are surviving, these confusing times .
this belief informs not only the novella series, but another melville house project, the neversink library (die - hard melville fans will note another allusion here) —a collection of lost, forgotten, and
foolishly ignored
books from around the world .
the next month, an amazon recruiter sent an e - mail to several editors at big publishing houses, looking for someone to launch a new new york - based publishing imprint. “the imprint will be supported with a large budget, and its success will directly impact the success of amazon’s overall business, ” read the e - mail, which was obtained by bloomberg businessweek .
although johnson is never short of quips about cash flow or amazon, he is as quick to talk about the joys of being able to publish the books he and merians love. melville house started, he pointed out, as “an art project. ” the true phenomenon is that, a decade, hundreds of books, and eight new employees later, it remains that way .
too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practice by literature' s greatest writers. in the art of the novella series, melville house celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time .
as kait howard, a publicist at melville house, points out, male representation increases to 40 percent at the executive levels of publishing, suggesting that men and women are still being promoted at different rates. a publisher’s weekly survey last year also found that the pay gap persists, citing an average salary of $ 70, 000 for men versus $ 51, 000 for women. in other words, while white women have clearly amassed a great deal of power in publishing, that power is in many cases concentrated at the lower and middle levels of the ranks, suggesting it’s too soon to declare total hegemony. but the survey is an essential, depressing reminder of the extent to which the feminist movement has swept in new opportunities for primarily straight, white, and affluent women while excluding others, especially women of color .
just three months after random house’s announcement, amazon had all but declared war on the six unruly members of its book supply chain. jeff bezos had $ 6 billion in cash, the patience to absorb losses for years, and a former big six chief to lead the fight. the long - running behind - the - scenes battle for control of the publishing industry had finally broken into full public view .
melville house uk has recruited director of marketing zeljka marosevic to run the business, joining from fourth estate. johnson said the british arm would at first concentrate on marketing its 60 frontlist titles, as well as selected backlist, distributed in britain through turnaround. the intention is to appoint an editorial director by the end of the year, reporting to johnson and “responsible for crafting a list distinct from that of the us company” .
it seems overly sentimental, but they really do impressive and brave work as a press—publishing debut authors and challenging writers of all kinds, moving the needle on amazon discourse, and bringing a blunt and plainspoken style to an often - stuffy industry. they strongly advocate for the value of the book and the industry in ways few publishers do or can. additionally, the staff is composed of incredibly smart, hard - working people who genuinely care about what they do and are willing to work long hours for low pay to pull it off. they are what’s behind the melville house brand and they deserve the credit for the company’s success .
johnson admits that the contemporary series has been a harder sell. the market for new novellas is not large, and it' s difficult for living authors to compete with the canonical writers in the classic series. also, because melville house must pay its contemporary authors—unlike the classics line authors, whose work is now public domain—the books are twice as expensive to produce. as of now, the old masters are subsidizing the upstarts .
when people fall in love with a book, johnson told me, they don' t want the experience to stop—readers will drift from a story' s final page to wikipedia, to further reading about the character, themes, and world. melville house wants extend the novella experience through a wealth of high - quality, curated materials; though the series only includes six classic books now, it will continue to grow—eventually including its contemporary counterparts .
the survey comes just weeks after the much - lauded news that penguin random house’s uk office will no longer require job applicants to have a college degree—but, as salon reports, the us offices have followed a similar policy for years, with minimal effect on the company’s diversity. jennifer baker, creator of the minorities in publishing podcast, points out that “marginalized people with degrees” already have a disproportionately hard time getting a foot in the door .
despite the success of the series, contemporary novella writers still face an uphill battle. encouraged by the success of their classics line, melville house launched a sister series called
the contemporary art of the novella ,
in 2006. showcasing mid - length works from living authors, this collection of 15 books demonstrates the form' s current diversity and vibrancy with works from well - known practitioners like steve stern and lore segal and young guns like tao lin .
about them just before their first two books came out, the writer began it: “how’s this for a disaster in the making? a writer and artist, living and working out of a third - floor walkup, decide to start their own publishing house. they have limited funds and almost no experience in the book business. to make matters even worse, the first two volumes they plan to issue seem to have almost no commercial potential. ”
david cay johnston: melville house press which is a little outfit in brooklyn and in london that do something - - when i did my very first book which you interviewed me about ,
temples of chance
back in 1992, i complained back then that my publisher was doing everything on paper and they were slow and they' re efficient, i said, somebody needs to make this modern and quick and modernize the book business, these folks did it .
and then melville house calls out of the blue and they asked, could we do the book in i think it was three weeks, i said no but i said i can do it by a date that was four weeks later, i wrote that book in 27 days. it was hell and i' m frankly not sure i' ve physically recovered at my age from doing it. i' m certainly never going to do it again but 27 days .
i was upset about what was happening to the book business in this country. random house had just been taken over by bertelsmann, amazon was new and being really weird, so i just kind of started commenting on all that. i felt like nobody was really talking about these things in the mainstream media. it was just kind of sad to see what was happening to these great, historic publishing companies. we’ve been lucky to link up with people who share that attitude .
, and got it into stores by early december—a miracle in itself because of the competition for shelf space at christmas. everyone was really excited. barnes and noble called to thank us! ” besides political activism, one area where melville house has made its mark is in resurrecting minor classics and important writers in translation whose work has sunk out of sight (full disclosure: last fall they republished my father michael glenny’s out - of - print translation from russian of soviet dissident georgii vladimov’s wonderful short novel
although johnson remains an outspoken figure on the difficulties of publishing, especially for indies, his successes are impressive. melville house, now located in a warehouse in brooklyn’s dumbo neighborhood (after moving from hoboken) has an additional staff of eight, and a handful of notable bestsellers. merians and johnson’s first real hit, bernard - henri lévy’s who killed daniel pearl? , came together the way many of their books seem to: they sought out the author, ignored at the time by u. s. houses because of disappointing past sales, and told him they were fans. after first asking lévy’s french publisher about some backlist titles, they were told he was working on a new book and asked if they would be interested in that .
akashic books is a brooklyn - based independent company dedicated to publishing urban literary fiction and political nonfiction by authors who are either ignored by the mainstream, or who have no interest in working within the ever - consolidating ranks of the major corporate publishers .
the art of the novella
dates from 2002, when johnson' s own fledgling press—founded with his wife, valerie merians, in 2001—was still running on credit cards .
at that point, melville house was a company that valerie and i were running off our kitchen table from a 3rd - floor walkup in hoboken ,
johnson told me. their first book, poetry after 9 / 11, had been a surprise hit, and the callow publishers were looking for their next big thing .
melville house is an independent publisher located in brooklyn, new york. it was founded in 2001 by sculptor valerie merians and fiction writer / journalist dennis johnson, in order to publish poetry after 9 / 11, a book of material culled from johnson’s groundbreaking mobylives book blog. the material consisted of things sent in to the blog by writers and poets in response to the 9 / 11 attacks, and johnson and merians felt it better represented the spirit of new york than the call to war of the bush administration .
the den mother, also described in the article as “one of publishing’s most visible cheerleaders, ” soon landed on her feet as book editor at oprah’s o magazine. but four years later came another astonishing story, when nelson accepted a position as editorial director at urltoken books .
dj: we’re doing something that publishers used to do. we get a lot of credit for being very edgy, state - of - the - art, digital hipsters, and i feel like we’re just doing something that all the great, famous american publishing houses did at their beginnings, when they were all privately owned companies. when random house was owned by bennett cerf, when knopf was owned by alfred a. knopf, when simon & schuster was owned by two guys named simon and schuster. now those companies are completely different, they’re conglomerates and they have to be more concerned with their bottom line. not that i’m not concerned with our bottom line, but i do feel like the company should express its passion, and that makes for great publishing. that’s how all the publishers i admire started .
“that display space they have in the store is really one of the most valuable places that exists in this country for communicating to the consumer that a book is a big deal, ” said madeline mcintosh, president of sales, operations and digital for random house .
david cay johnston: well, because i have a pretty good sized twitter following. they - - melville house is very good at marketing and they were out telling people about the book. the initial orders we got from bookstores were just nothing because there are a bunch of trump books and my fear was what would happen to my last two bestsellers, they ran out of books. well, that happened. a lot of bookstores ran out of books first week in and then they' ve started ordering lots of books. so it' s now readily available .
these stories capture pretty well the state of book publishing: this appears to be no ordinary, cyclical crisis that future authors and publishers will shrug off. to understand how the book industry got into this predicament, however, a broader perspective may be needed. the cover story of february’s
even with a large budget, directly affecting the success of amazon’s overall business is a tall order for a new publishing imprint. amazon pulled in well north of $ 40 billion in revenue last year (final numbers aren’t yet in), dwarfing the combined revenues of the big six publishers .
a strange object is an independent press based in austin, texas, dedicated to publishing surprising, heartbreaking fiction alongside thoughtful ephemera. we' re talking about fiction that haunts and inspires us—big work that engulfs, that takes risks, that bucks form, that builds warm dwellings in dark places .
booksellers and publishers are worried that amazon is going to devour their industry. the giant online retailer seems to have its hands in all aspects of the business, from publishing books to selling them — and that has some in the book world wondering if there is any end to amazon' s influence .
dlj: it’s no criticism of them, though. they are what they are. they have businesses and they need to make money, and they need to survive. but there are two publishing models, and in this model, the agent is another person with needs that don’t benefit their client. and they can’t admit that. if you need an agent to deal with melville house, then valerie and i are not doing our job. we have had many instances of writers, even well - known writers, bringing us a book project that no other publisher would do because it’s small or different or weird or out of their norm. and we’re happy to do it and excited to do it, and an agent will step in and say, “if you can’t give us an advance, you’re not getting that book. ” and we won’t get that book and so that book is never ever made .
and so i went to work when i was 10 years old. i went to work fulltime at 13. i became a reported for some weekly papers at 17 and my work immediately got noticed because i did some simple things. if the school board said the average owner - - the owner - - the average $ 34, 314 house in santa cruz next year will pay $ 42. 11 more in property taxes, i thought that was useful, so with long division i said, you' ll pay so much more per thousand in the value of your house .
dj: [ milo yiannopoulos’ book deal ], that was kind of a crucial incident i was very sorry to see pass as it did. i feel like the publishing industry had its first opportunity to fight the trump administration and it failed miserably by essentially supporting yiannopoulos. i was shocked by that and extremely disappointed that such a great, historic publishing company like simon & schuster went there. but they did. i was unable to foment a boycott of them because apparently they also publish some good books and people felt like that was reason enough for them to be allowed to publish really heinous hate speech by a fascist .
write bloody publishes and promotes great books of poetry every year. they are a small press with a snappy look, dedicated to quality literature printed in the usa. they are not a printer, they are a sweet publishing house located on the outskirts of austin, texas. as of 2015, they have launched 102 titles and 40 ebooks. they publish some of the top - selling, living poets in america. they are proud to be one of the few publishers that prints their books in the usa. they plant a tree in a needy forest for every book they print during first run printings .
we have received a few amazing entries and have some goods ones to show off. we were surprised to get one from a professional house. the others have been amateur. but we are really pleased and i actually like the one that nathan, our publicist, did with the cartoons and japanese fighters .
no one had done it before ,
johnson told me .
it was a new idea, and new ideas always meet resistance. the publishing industry, like anything else, is uncomfortable with change. if somebody hasn' t done it before, the thinking goes, there must be a reason for it .
when i asked how people at harpercollins have reacted to her arrival from amazon, nelson laughed and said, “people are curious. i mean, nobody has sat me down and tried to deprogram me or something. i think that people think that i know something about publishing and bookselling from having been at amazon for four years. ”
lee & low sent its survey to 13, 237 people at all levels of the publishing and book reviewing professions, from marketing assistants to senior editors. some major publishers, including penguin random house, participated, although it appears that others, including harpercollins and simon and schuster, did not. the overall response rate was 25. 8 percent. of the respondents, 79 percent were white, 78 percent were cis women, and 88 percent were straight. the pool was 4 percent black, 7 percent asian / native hawaiian or other pacific islander, and 6 percent hispanic, latino, or mexican; 8 percent of respondents reported being disabled .
melville house is also well - known for its fiction, with two nobel prize winners on its list: imre kertesz and heinrich boll. in particular, the company has developed a world - wide reputation for its rediscovery of forgotten international writers — its translation of a forgotten work by hans fallada, every man dies alone, launched a world - wide phenomenon. the company also takes pride in its discovery of many first - time writers — such as lars iyer (spurious), tao lin (shoplifting from american apparel), jeremy bushnell (the weirdness) and christopher boucher (how to keep your volkswagen alive) — all of whom have gone on to greater success .
it is and it isn’t. it is an original idea from melville house. consumers were not necessary beating down doors. for any indie bookseller that is selling e - books, we wanted to give printed matter a specific qr code, so if people are in the store, they can buy it right there in the bookstore. indie booksellers are always complaining that indie stores are just a display, then customers proceed to buy the e - books from amazon right in the store. we are trying to give booksellers the opportunity to keep those sales. we do think that there is value in shopping in an indie store; you can do everything you want right there .
fair point. i actually give sara credit for staying each place for as much as four years–that indicates digging in deeply enough to learn how publishing looks from that perspective. and given how entrenched and distrustful it’s possible to get when an industry undergoes disruption, i appreciate someone willing to see the world from the other side of a divide .
what’s clear is that as long as publishing houses stay overwhelmingly white, so will the authors they select and the characters and stories that they put into the world. lee & low points out that the proportion of children’s books that contain “ multicultural content ” has hovered at around 10 percent for the past 18 years. adult publishing isn’t much better. that’s a problem for people of color, who deserve to tell their stories, and to read stories that reflect them. and it’s also a problem for society as a whole. “there’s a currently popular argument that books help us feel empathy, ” rebecca solnit wrote recently, “but if they do so they do it by helping us imagine that we are people we are not… which is a reminder that literature and art can also help us fail at empathy if it sequesters us in the boring old fortress of magnificent me. ” lee & low has quantified the extent to which publishing remains a boring old fortress. hopefully the survey will help to crack open the gates .
and then the next year, i went to the white house to get the president' s tax returns and i said, there' s nothing here about the new book, what is it and i think (jodie ender from night river) hollered out letters to buddy and socks and i go, yes, about the pets .
inadvertently, johnson said, melville house
had come up with a way of having a classics line that featured very famous names but lesser - known works in most cases .
the series quickly became profitable. because all the works were public domain, there weren' t authors to pay—only translators, and not in all cases. they saved money on the simple design, which turned out to be a boon (
people really responded to not only what the books were, but the look of them ,
johnson said .
people liked the look enough to show them off .
) the end result was an eye - catching series of
new
and overlooked books by beloved authors, priced reasonably. customers snapped them up .
who killed daniel pearl? , published in the u. s. on september 1, 2003, not only sold well—johnson said it has moved, in the u. s. , about 35, 000 in hardcover and another 19, 000 in paperback—it also generated a lot of news. it broke information about pakistan that mainstream journalists in the states had not been able to crack, drawing a notable amount of press for its author and, in turn, melville house. (johnson recalled how he and merians, at the time of the book’s publication, would find themselves hanging out at the carlyle with the author, who was taking secret meetings with people like tom brokaw. “all the american journalists wanted information from [ lévy ] about pakistan, ” johnson said. )
david cay johnston: i was born in san francisco. i consider home to be santa cruz, california. my father was 100 percent disabled veteran of world war ii. my mother was a disowned heiress and i had the odd experience of growing up in a house on a cliff over the beach that my parents rented for maybe $ 400 on today' s money, nothing .
there is so much, so many wild things…for example, letters that melville was writing around the time of bartelby and the philosophy he was trying to espouse, which then lead us to giving examples of that philosophy. we have examples of his friends writing back to him, and of course the de tocqueville criticism. we even found a newspaper ad about the book, maps from wall street of the day, a recipe for ginger nuts .
when we started the company, valerie and i knew nothing about publishing. so we were always going to people and asking for advice, and i remember everyone telling us that the way you sell books was through word of mouth. you could never see it, or know how to achieve it, but if a book sold well you would just assume you had it. nobody could tell you how to generate word of mouth .
on the same day the pair struck their deal with ipg, the new york times sent a reporter to profile johnson and merians. although the reporter, johnson said, was a fan of mobylives, his piece called the publishing endeavor, named after johnson’s web site, a “disaster in the making. ” (the times journalist cited the pair’s “limited funds” and the fact that they had “almost no experience in the book business. ” )
vm: it was an art project kind of idea. kgb: i read that in the beginning you planned on doing six books a year, and it seems that number has already expanded. have you expanded because you are approached with more ideas, or is it because you have the capability to do more? vm: as we were going along, we were learning more and more about the book publishing business, and how you can do it and make it work. our capabilities were growing and our interests kept expanding. we felt like we had this amazing staff—they’re all completely brilliant and we’re very thankful to have them. we feel like we can really do some exciting stuff here and really contribute to the culture in a concrete way. and one of the things we’ve been very interested in, throughout the short history of the company, is publishing european and foreign work .
but as to where the industry’s going, i think everything’s different. the media is suddenly very different, tuned differently. we’ve been doing a whole bunch of books, for the last year or so, what i call “crash books” — books that you make in a month or two as opposed to the normal 18 months. and it’s a really different kind of publishing. the business is not built up to support that kind of publishing. you’re supposed to have much more time for editing and production and salesmanship and pre - publicity, pre - marketing. we’re kind of changing everything for these books. the neat thing is that people really dig it. people in the industry are really responding to that, our sales team gets really excited. it makes their lives harder to do these books and they don’t have enough time, yet they’re very excited to handle books like that .
and the spokesman says, well, the clintons gave the copyright to a public charity which is the implicit advice to my story and i said, really, and the spokesman said, yes, and the white house wants to be on record, the clintons did not take their advice from the
new york times
which went everybody erupted to laughter because they obviously did that and it meant more money for charity and less for the government .
their decision to launch a line of classic novellas generated fierce opposition from advisers, and received outright disdain from colleagues in publishing. johnson remembers a famous publisher, whom he wouldn' t name, vowing he would
eat his hat
if they could sell joyce' s
the dead
as a standalone volume. thin - lipped sales reps promised that
the art of the novella ,
if greenlighted, would amount to a quixotic and very public form of suicide .
discusses amazon’s campaign to prevent other booksellers from securing a foothold in the booming e - book market and the company’s furious reaction to random house’s decision last march to adopt agency pricing for e - books, just as five of the other “big six” trade publishers had the previous year. (before agency pricing, amazon could sell e - books from big six publishers at deep discounts, taking losses at a rate that barnes & noble could never afford to match. see
went on to sell 12, 000 copies, small potatoes in general terms but a massive hit in the poetry world—“i think maybe only [ former poet laureate ] billy collins has sold more in recent years, ” johnson says proudly. johnson’s blog, which had a big readership, and where some of the poems in the collection had originally appeared, was a big source of publicity. incidentally, the blog, mobylives. com, was the inspiration behind the new company’s name, for obvious reasons—though they settled on melville house only as a last - minute fallback after trying “leviathan” and “runagate, ” both of which turned out to be taken. “we were in the process of incorporating the company, and our attorney was saying, ‘hey, guys, i have an hour to file these papers, ’” says johnson. “it ended up being a good choice, even though we weren’t crazy about it at the time”—perhaps its combination of weight and unobtrusiveness lends it an authoritative, established air .
over the years, i have found that the best way to publish is also the best way to write — from the heart. i was fortunate to approach the publishing industry without any experience. so i went with what i knew. i didn’t like books with introductions, so the novellas were stripped down without introductions. the illuminations represent the kind of research i would do after reading a classic. it gives you an opportunity to follow your passions after reading a book. it is a full experience .
social media is fantastic if that is your attitude about publishing because there’s so many more ways to get your passion out. we can’t make books fast enough to cover the kinds of things i think we need to cover. we get a lot more done by social media that we do, by the blogging in a very in - depth, particular way, but also by twitter, instagram, you name it. i’m delighted, really thrilled that we’ve got people here who are as into it as i am .
david cay johnston: i don' t remember reading that shakespeare. maybe that' s there. but fred trump was an incredibly industrious guy. he was really hardworking but he also was a guy who profiteered on gi housing after the war and president eisenhower, when he found that out that fred trump had $ 4 million of excess profits, threw a fit in the white house and the proof of that is a 100 federal investigators reported on fred trump and a few other developers .
the survey results suggest that instead of patting itself on the back for lowering superficial barriers, the literary world needs to actively recruit more staff who aren’t, well, straight white women. (no bonus points allotted for straight white men .) as quartz suggests, “pushing publishing companies to launch diversity initiatives may take things a step in the right direction. readers and writers can also be more vocal about what they’d like to read; after all, publishers are businesses, and businesses need people to buy their product. ”
melville house publishing is an independent publisher of literary fiction , non-fiction , and poetry . the company was founded in 2001 by the husband and wife team of dennis loy johnson and valerie merians in hoboken , new jersey , a location johnson jokingly called " the left bank " of new york city . in 2007 , they were named by the association of american publishers as the winner of the 2007 miriam bass award for creativity in independent publishing , popularly known as the " indie publisher of the year " award . 
melville house publishing is an independent publisher of literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. the company was founded in 2001 by the husband and wife team of dennis loy johnson and valerie merians in hoboken, new jersey, a location johnson jokingly called " the left bank " of new york city. in 2007, they were named by the association of american publishers as the winner of the 2007 miriam bass award for creativity in independent publishing, popularly known as the " indie publisher of the year " award.
melville house publishing is an independent publisher of literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. the company was founded in 2001 by the husband and wife team of dennis loy johnson and valerie merians in hoboken, new jersey, a location johnson jokingly called " the left bank " of new york city. in 2007, they were named by the association of american publishers as the winner of the 2007 miriam bass award for creativity in independent publishing, popularly known as the " indie publisher of the year " award.