Interview: Soft Skull Press
Richard Nash, publisher of Soft Skull (left)
Soft Skull’s FAQ informs that this indie press began as a guerilla operation out of Kinko’s when founder Sander Hicks was an employee there in 1992. Hicks has parted since, but with Richard Nash serving as the publisher beginning 2001, it has been printing over 40 titles a year. Its titles span a range of genres, including fiction, poetry, politics, translations, art and erotica. To give the readers a sample of the work it’s been putting out, here are some of the books that were published this year: Lynn Tillman’s American Genius: a Comedy, Kevin Powell’s Someday We’ll All Be Free, Jonathan Becker’s Bush and Putin as Leaders, Nikolai Maslov’s Sibera, David Griffith’s A Good War Is Hard to Find, Marck Swartz’s H2O, and Martin Millar’s The Good Fairies of New York.
Interview after the jump
Following is an interview conducted with publisher Richard Nash over email:
I hope you don’t laugh it off, but your floor was wet, was it not? How did this happen, and how has it been with the new location (Dumbo)?
RN: The floor is varnish. It looks wet, but it’s dry. We love the new location: there’s heating, and no one has walked in off the street and stolen a laptop.
Being a small press you probably feel “understaffed and over-harassed” often, but the smallness also allows a lot more love to be put into a project. How do you feel about the choice you have to make between expanding to publish more talent and limiting yourself so that you can continue to put intimate care into each project?
RN: The primary struggle, above all, is money. As one British publisher once said, A publisher’s primary duty to its authors is to remain solvent. The trade-off you mention, between scale and intimacy is key, and cultural ambition—wanting to have a real impact of the culture, plays its ways in there too. But the real learning curve is of financial survival, when you don’t have a century’s worth of backlist as the corporate publishers do, and you don’t have investors or trustfunds, or a university sponsor, or ongoing foundation and donor support. The less intimate the relationship between the publisher and the author, and the publisher and the reader, the harder it is going to be to sell the books. The intimacy pertains particularly in the latter area, quite honestly: publisher-reader, though the former, author-publisher, can serve the latter, since often times an author knows her audience better than the publisher does. But it’s important to not get hung up on the internal love, in the office, at the lunch and so on. The important thing is to be connecting the author to the reader.
But, to return to the financial struggle, the kinds of activities that build readers one by one, well it is hard to make them scalable. I can have a correspondence with 100 people, personally telling them why they might like a given book, but selling 100 books is gonna put me out of business. So I have to figure out how to sell 10’s of 1000’s of books.
Soft Skull office
There seems to be a general agreement about the shortage of readers in the United States. How do you feel about this, and what has your experience been with a foreign audience?
RN: I don’t really conceive of the situation as being a broad “shortage-of-readers”. Most literate people are reading something. Newspapers, websites, magazines, business reports. There’s an enormous number of people out there seeking to be entertained and edified, and we do our best to reach them. Now, how well are publishers reaching these folks?, probably not so well. So we keep trying to do better. And Soft Skull, in particular, keeps trying to reach younger people, in part because a lot of publishers are particularly unsuccessful there.
Not sure what you mean by experience with a foreign audience?
I was just wondering how often the books you publish are distributed abroad and how they are generally perceived there; also, how important international distribution is to you, and if you have formed an opinion of it in terms of Soft Skull’s priorities and activities.
RN: Ah well. There’re two components, distribution of our English language editions, and translation of our books into other languages. Soft Skull is big in Italy, 13 of our books have been or are to be translated. We get some attention in Germany, France, Turkey. Not much in the Netherlands, Scandanavia or the Iberian peninsula.
In terms of distribution of our English-language editions, it’s much more book by book: Stencil Pirates does very well internationally. Our fiction does decently, English language in Europe. But, logistically, it would be impossible to be able to keep track; our distributor reports Europe as…”EUROPE”! It could be a full-time job for one person to try to keep up with that stuff. Translations are much easier, because it’s publisher-to-publisher interaction. And we have agents in each country. It’s an aspect of the job I love, meeting my peers in London and Frankfurt Book Fairs, but on the level of the reader and the reception, I couldn’t know. Independents are pretty embedded in their culture—although I’m Irish, so I have a slightly askew relationship to American culture.
Overall, about 6% of our sales is to the UK, 5% to Canada, and 2% to the rest of the world, I’m continually trying to improve all those numbers, though.
What are some of the considerations you make when trying to reach a younger audience? It seems that if a reader is not influenced by books early on, it becomes harder to get their attention, especially as the number of things trying to get young people’s attention is on the rise. And how do you see the relevance of books changing, if at all, as other media such as the internet and television make advances?
RN: Well, really we just try to do the coolest books we can do, believing that there’s a sector of smart older teenagers looking for different perspectives. And we just follow through as best we can, in terms of the editing, the cover, the blurbs, the copy, the MySpace page, the continual Technorati searching. I guess one key thing we try to not do, is not talk down. Not assume that kids aren’t interested in weird experimental stuff, or poetry, or gender, or other cultures. We are, and they are. Also, the average age in the office at any given moment is about 24; I’m the only person at Soft Skull over 30 (I’m 36). So we’re pretty close to the age of teen readers anyway. As for other media, yeah, I mean over the course of the past five decades, TV changed everything. The internet though, much less so. TV is passive and mass-market. It just beams shit at you all evening long and you take it (improving incrementally since cable). The internet though, I don’t know we’ve been in it long enough to know, but yeah it competes for attention but also it’s really how people find out about our books. Soft Skull would barely exist without this.
Out of curiosity, is it any easier to sell the Erotica titles?
RN: Ah, we’d need to be deeper into it, and have the stuff be a little less weird. The two ones we’ve done are pretty out there. It’s hard to complete with those beautiful and somewhat more mainstream Cleis Press books. I do think there’s scope to develop a better erotica line, probably by working more in the Suicide Girls universe. There are a bunch of young folks, doing their own online stuff, they could also be writing, or working with a ghostwriter friend, to be doing books. Something a little more countercultural, but not quite as high-falutin as Bottoms Up and What The Fuck…
Ideally, consumer habits would provide a climate in which small publishers can thrive, but there are some who adopt a non-profit model, especially when promising to produce a certain kind of work. How do you feel about the non-profit model for publishing in general?
RN: Well it allows people to leave the office at 6 in the evening; and to have health insurance; and an approximation of a personal life, because, in effect for every dollar you get in sales, you get another dollar from a foundation. Don’t get me wrong, that takes work and talent to get that money, and it is deserved, but I don’t have the aptitude for that kind of work. But an entire sector of American publishing would vanish without it. Poetry would almost completely disappear, and a big chunk of fiction would. And, obviously scholarly work the university presses do.
But I made my choice, after a fashion, to be “for profit.”
Please tell us about some of the projects that are keeping you busy.
Well, there are about 30 projects, candidly, but to mention a few, we’ve launched a series of books in translation, one of which just came out, Electric Flesh by Claro, a brilliant young French writer who is the pre-eminent translator of contemporary American fiction in France: Vollman, Gass, Barth, Cooper, Acker. In fact, he translated two of the five NBA nominees, Danielewski and Powers, and, on top of that, he’s Power’s publisher in France (he has his own imprint). This is a book about electricity and Houdini, to give a crude approximation. And another we have in the pipeline, coming out at the end of February, is African Psycho, by a Congolese writer who writes in French, Alain Mabanckou. His most recent book just won the super-prestigious Prix renaudot last week, but the one we’re doing is an earlier work, called African Pscyho, about a neurotic, would-be serial killer.
