Check out the *starred review* that Belt’s November title, “The Great Black Swamp: Toxic Algae, Toxic Relationships, and the Most Interesting Place in America Nobody’s Ever Heard Of” received.
Novelist Wensink presents a charming, idiosyncratic love letter to his native Ohio…. In August 2014, the environmental monotony was broken by the appearance of a “strange lime-colored goo” on Lake Erie—“an algae bloom so large... it was visible from space” and “so toxic it could have killed the entire city” of Toledo. Investigating the algae bloom sends Wensink delving into the history of Toledo…and its surrounding region, which in the mid-19th century was “one million acres of dark, deadly, impenetrable swamp” halfway between Chicago and New York…. With humor and pathos, Wensink weaves his own life into this twisty environmental history, from his farmer ancestors to the dissolution of his marriage. Funny, fascinating, and sneakily profound, this delights.
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The longer I spend researching the history of American publishing, the more I realize most of the answers to what ails contemporary American publishing lie therein. Or, put differently, what we think of as “traditional publishing” isn’t, in fact, very old. It’s fairy recent.
By “traditional publishing” I’m referring to proposals or manuscripts, often brokered by agents, which often receive upfront advances upon royalties. The costs for the book are underwritten by a publishing house, who contracts with printing houses, an entirely separate industry, to produce the material products. The publishing house also pays the wages for an extensive staff that does required specialized work: editing, copyediting, proofing, designing, marketing, selling, publicizing, budgeting, and, often, distributing. The result of the labor of all these experts and industries, plus the author, is then offered to wholesalers, who are often managed through another intermediary (and industry), distributors. Retailers—independent bookstores, Amazon, gift shops—yet one more independent industry—then buy those products from the publishers, marking them up to cover their costs, and sell them to the public.
This was, more or less, the twentieth century model. But not the 19th, nor the 18th. Nor is it the 21st, for much longer, I’d argue. A host of other models of publishing have been flourishing this century, and they may soon overtake the “traditional” one. Most fall under the umbrella of self-publishing which was arguably the dominant form in 18th and early 19th century America. Crowdfunding—or subscription publishing, to give it its earlier terms—often finances self-publishing. Bookstores—see McNally Editions—were initially the same as publishers, and the same as printers: it was all bundled into one industry instead of segmented into three or four. Hell, one of the most popular books in American history, Parson Weem’s biography of George Washington, was written by a sales rep, who worked for the publisher who published the book, and who also printed it, and who also sold it, out of the the front of the print shop/publishing house in Philadelphia. Most of these are “traditional”—as in used in the past—types of publishing circumvented the many middlemen of today’s fragmented landscape, leaving more money on the table for authors, and, when they sell directly to the public, publishers as well. But they are not what we now refer to as “traditional” publishing.
Of course one does not have look into moldy books about long dead publishers of now forgotten books to understand how this business model might work today: so many other industries have long ago switched to more directly connecting to audiences (um, Substacks? aka blogs? aka “newsletters,” which, after all, were a 15th century industry that was replaced by…newspapers ). We still have to wait a year, if we are lucky: often it is two to three years, for “traditional” publishing to turn its cranky gears and get a book to market, while Drake and Kendrick Lamar can flood the populace mere days after they finish editing their feuds. There is no reason books can’t be published quicker, or that publishing hasn’t followed the leads of these other industries in exploiting the digital age for what it giveth (although its ability to resist what the digital age taketh away, namely revenue, has also been its salvation). Traditional book publishing is in many way basically one big Harpers Magazine re: refusing the innovations of the internet.
That long preamble brings to me my next test case of publishing history as a way to reimagine the current industry: Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.
Louisa May Alcott was one of the best selling authors of the 19th century—a century in which there was certainly much competition for those spots. She had close partnerships with her publisher, Roberts & Brothers, and her editor, Thomas Niles, that lasted for two decades. Together they published eleven novels and fourteen books of short stories. These made Louisa rich, or at least no longer destitute, as her parents, notably her famous father, Bronson, was constitutionally unable to support his family. Alcott had to write for money, because she had to support her parents.
Her partnership with Roberts and Brothers began with a rejection—her to them. Alcott had been publishing letters she had written to her family in a magazine, the Boston-based Commonwealth, while she worked as a nurse during the Civil War. Roberts and Brothers reached out to her about publishing the letters as a book, but she turned them down, instead saying yes to a similar offer by James Redpath, principally because he was an outspoken abolitionist. It was a mistake, as she later wrote in her own marginalia: “Short-sighted, Louisa! Little did you dream that this same Roberts would help you make your fortune a few years later…Redpath had no skill as a publisher & the Sketches never made much money.”
Roberts and Brothers were a small house then (they would later be bought by Little, Brown, and Company in 1898. Little, Brown was bought by Time in 1968, and became part of the Time Warner Group in 1989. In 2006, Time was sold to the French company Hachette Livre. Hachette launched a US subsidiary, Hachette Book Group USA. You can now find Little, Brown nested under the Hachette Imprints menu. With about 3 billion dollars/year in revenue in the US, Hachette is the third largest publisher in the world.)
Niles, it is famously said, asked her to write a book for girls. Alcott was not thrilled with the idea, but game to try. He gave her a maximum of one year to write it, and said it needed to be 200 pages or longer. Louisa started work on it, unhappily, as she did not “like girls, or know many, except my sisters.” She sent Niles the first 12 chapters, which Alcott didn’t much like, nor Niles either. Still, they continued, Niles asking for at least 24 chapters, the title to be Little Women, and that it end with the promise of a possible sequel. Alcott did as asked.
It was only at this point that money changed hands, with Niles offering Alcott $1000 for the publishing rights to the book (Alcott retained copyright).
The book was published in October 1868, only thirteen months after Niles suggested Alcott write the book. It hit right away, selling out the initial 2000 copy print run in weeks. This initial volume of the book is only the first half of what we consider the book to be today, and readers of that volume wrote many fan letters, most with the express wish that the characters marry, since that the was goal of a woman’s life. Mostly, they wanted Jo to marry Laurie. Alcott refused: “I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please any one.” They also wanted the next book to come out as soon as possible: fan pressure was intense. By March 1869—six months after the first volume appeared, they had sold 3,000 advance copies of volume 2, and 55,000 copies of volume 1, now in its 7th edition. In April 1869 it published, and by the end of the month had already received rave reviews. Jo famously does not marry Laurie, as Alcott resisted all the fan pressure for a happily ever after. She does, however, marry, to a rather boring old teacher, and then focuses on her duty, and doing good, if not well.
Alcott said yes all along the way in what we might today call an IP play—writing a book a publisher and editor suggested and titled, because there was a gap in the market they felt it could fill—because she needed money, only resisting the most mercenary aspect with a slight twist to the ending. It would be, most would agree, not only what made her rich, but also the best novel she ever wrote. The entire process, from start to finish, from idea to drafting to publishing two separate books, took 18 months.
