Despite the current challenges facing the publishing industry, war and military history titles continue to sell—the recession, a plethora of free online information and the declining number of living WWII veterans evidently have not affected books. Publishers offer many explanations for their success, but the most obvious reason the category continues to thrive might simply be the sheer number of Americans who are associated with the military. According to the
Department of Defense, the number of people serving in the U.S. armed forces stood at 1,402,227 as of December 31, 2008. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs lists the number of living veterans at 23,442,000. Add family members and friends of current or retired military personnel, and it's no wonder publishers find a market for their titles.
“You have quite a large demographic potentially interested in things military,” says Harley B. Patrick, publisher of L&R Publishing/Hellgate Press. “But while I think the numbers play a large role in the genre's popularity, it's not the whole story.” Patrick cites America's fascination with heroism and hero archetypes. He says readers are hard-pressed to find another topic that forces them to confront fundamentally human challenges like death, loss and survival as a matter of routine. Hellgate's The Ether Zone: U.S. Army Special Forces Detachment B-52, Project Delta has done extremely well: within two weeks of publication last month, online orders had increased 300%. Author Ray Morris relates the history of one of the Vietnam War's most clandestine special ops units. Vietnam has been a boon category for Hellgate, says Patrick. “All of our top sellers are Vietnam War titles.” Perhaps that success has as much to do with the number of living Vietnam veterans: the latest U.S. Census Bureau report notes there are more than eight million surviving Vietnam veterans.
Rowman & Littlefield is also banking on a new Vietnam title. According to the publisher, America in Vietnam: The War That Couldn't Be Won by Col. Herbert Schandler offers a “controversial and timely book about the American experience in Vietnam [and] provides for the first time a full exploration of the perspectives of the North Vietnamese leadership before, during and after the war.” After serving in Vietnam, Schandler became the George C. Marshall professor of grand strategy at National Defense University.
Casemate Publishers managing editor, Steven Smith, has witnessed increased interest in his books since the economic downturn. “People are turning to new books as opposed to going to a Yankee game,” says Smith, who believes that military history books continue to sell because differing perspectives on wartime issues necessitate considerable research to “get to the truth.” Although WWII remains the category's most dynamic topic, according to Smith, he thinks Afghanistan will be the prime topic as the war there intensifies. “Iraq may have been a misbegotten war, but Afghanistan is a necessary one,” Smith claims. Calling the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan an edge-of-the-seat drama, he wonders whether the U.S. can prevail in “this remote land where every previous empire has failed.”
The army has made civilians' search for information on Iraq and Afghanistan more difficult than it should be. Take the 2008 shutdown of former U.S. Army Capt. Matt Gallagher's blog, “Kaboom: A Soldier's War Journal,” as a prime example. According to Gallagher's June 27, 2008, blog entry, the site was shut down due to a rash posting. Says Gallagher: “Though I committed no OPSEC (operations security) violations, due to a series of extenuating circumstances—the least of which was me being on leave—my May 28 posting, 'The Only Difference Between Martyrdom and Suicide Is Press Coverage,' did not go through the normal vetting channels. It's totally on me, as it was too much unfiltered truth. I'm a soldier first, and orders are orders.” Da Capo Press has acquired the personal narrative of Gallagher's tour in Iraq and will publish the book, Kaboom, next spring. (See sidebar, p. 30). But not everything executive editor RobertPigeon sees on the Web is as gripping as Gallagher's. “While the Internet is brimming with free war and military content, much of the material is straightforward. The information is good for research, but it isn't strong narrative history.” Readers, in Pigeon's experience, are more willing to pay “good money for a good story” rather than for pages and pages of reference material.
Can the Publishing Industry and the Blogosphere Coexist?
The blogosphere and social-networking sites like Twitter should be a cause for concern for publishers. The information on these sites is free, firsthand and uncensored (unless a site gets shut down). The tweets posted during demonstrations against Iran's June 12 disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad serve as indicators of the power of online information. A June 18 Washington Post article, “Iran Elections: A Twitter Revolution?,” contained the following statement: “The State Department asked social-networking site Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance earlier this week to avoid disrupting communications.... The move illustrates the growing influence of online social-networking services as a communications media. Foreign news coverage of the unfolding drama, meanwhile, was limited by Iranian government restrictions barring journalists from 'unauthorized' demonstrations.” If the Internet can provide instantaneous free coverage of an event in a country as media-hostile as Iran, how can a book about the Roman Empire sell for $24.99?
“Accounts of weapons data, troop movements... without a strong narrative can't compete with all the reference material available on the Internet,” argues Zenith Press editor Steve Gansen. “Wikipedia, Globalsecurity.org, soldiers' blogs [are] up-to-the-minute and easily searchable and free.”
Despite the value of online information, publishers doubt readers will abandon their books. “Military history readers are very loyal,” says Pigeon at Da Capo. “They may put off buying a new car, but they will buy the latest book in their area of interest.” Smith of Casemate offers a similar opinion, crediting military literature enthusiasts as a loyal audience that “continues to buy our books [and] also keeps us on our toes.” He claims that readers demand the highest quality information packed with “value and credibility.”
“There is a lot of information online, but a lot of it is of dubious quality,” contends Osprey's U.K. marketing director, Richard Sullivan. “When you are passionate about getting the detail right—as our customers are—[dubious quality] is a problem.” He notes that judging the integrity of online material is difficult when readers are unfamiliar with the content's origin, which is why Sullivan thinks readers return to Osprey's books. “Our customers know that [our titles] will have been checked and rechecked for accuracy by reputable editors and sources.” Osprey's books also cater to collectors. Sullivan argues that a collector's satisfaction on purchasing an Osprey title can't be rivaled by anything on the Web. Battlescapes: A Photographic Testament to 2,000 Years of Conflict, edited by Marcus Cowper, will surely complement any military enthusiast's coffee table. The book is billed as “a timelessly apt tribute to landscapes which will forever be remembered for that brief moment in time when they were consumed by war.”
Another visually stimulating title is Mike Conroy's War Stories: A Graphic History (Collins Design), which features the 20th and 21st centuries' most popular war comics, from Battle Action and Warlord to the perennially popular Commando Picture Library Series. Covered in the book are pre—20th-century wars, the World Wars, Korea, Vietnam and military action following 9/11. According to editor Julia Abramoff, “curling up in bed or a recliner” to read is a much more enjoyable experience than sitting at a computer.
Most publishers find that the stories posted online are far too brief. Ballantine associate editor Ryan Doherty insists that the stories he publishes are not available in any substantial form online. Crown executive editor Rick Horgan shares Doherty's contention that total immersion in a story trumps the content found in online archives or articles. “A book invites rereadings, slow pondering, rumination and the tactile feel of turning pages,” Horgan says. “Books can be savored in a way that online material cannot.” He believes that on-scene reportage is the first method of war writing to wither in appeal once enough information is dispensed to the public about a particular conflict. The style of writing he looks for when acquiring titles is one that is more interpretive, or, as he calls it, a “what does it all mean?” book. This approach to writing invites readers to reread and often rethink the material.
A title certain to instigate debate is Princeton University Press's Nothing Less than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History by John Lewis (Jan.). Princeton's executive editor and group publisher Chuck Myers claims the title “provides [readers] with illuminating historical precedents for understanding our current military and strategic predicaments.”
Ace in the Hole
Despite the changes in how information is dispersed and how authors tell their stories, one factor has remained constant within the military history category: books on WWII are perennial favorites. The Department of Veterans Affairs estimates the number of living American WWII veterans at 2,583,000 as of September 2008. Comprising a population nearly 80% larger than the current active U.S. military, these veterans remain an important demographic—one whose stories have proved consistently lucrative for publishers. “WWII remains the gold vein of military history publishing,” says Smith of Casemate. “Its gigantic scale and intricacies allow for new, original perspectives to come out all the time. There are entire battles that haven't been covered yet, plus new interpretations of battles yet to be written.”
The category is sure to be reinvigorated by the Tom Hanks/Steven Spielberg collaboration being produced next year by HBO. The Pacific, a 10-hour miniseries, follows the lives of three men from their first clash with the Japanese in the jungles of Guadalcanal through the killing fields of Okinawa to the triumphant yet uneasy return home after V-J Day. The project is based on the memoirs With the Old Breed by Eugene Sledge (Presidio, 1981) and Helmet for My Pillow by Robert Leckie (Bantam, 1957). Like the previous Hanks/Spielberg WWII collaborations Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, publishers are hoping this work sparks renewed interest in the evergreen category.
With the Naval Institute Press about to release several WWII titles, director Rick Russell is banking on the topic's success. Hell to Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan, 1945—1947 will no doubt appeal to fans of HBO's project. According to Russell, D.M. Giangreco's book “examines the many complex issues that comprised the strategic plans for the proposed invasion of Japan.” The book argues that President Truman's decision to drop an atomic bomb was based on very real estimates of the truly horrific cost of a conventional invasion. Also addressing the Pacific front is We Were Pirates: A Torpedoman's Pacific War, in which Robert Schultz and James Shell use diaries, letters and recollections to tell Robert Hunt's personal tale of the war fought from the torpedo room on 12 war patrols.
The Pacific front is also covered in Farrar, Straus & Giroux's Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath, which, in addition to its July appearance on PW's bestseller list, has garnered considerable critical praise. Michael and Elizabeth Norman chronicle the single largest defeat in military history, the surrender of 76,000 Filipino and American soldiers and the unparalleled cruelty they faced at the hands of the Japanese. The book works, says senior editor Paul Elie, because of its “novelist's sense of detail and a veteran's sense of war's terror, loneliness and waste of life.”
Little, Brown recently announced its own major WWII title, by historian Anthony Beevor, set to be published in 2012 (see “Why I Write,” p. 37). Beevor, author of five WWII titles (including Viking's forthcoming D-Day: The Battle for Normandy), has received the Runciman Prize, the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Hawthornden Prize and the Wolfson History Prize, among other awards. Little, Brown publisher Michael Pietsch calls Beevor's upcoming tome “the essential document of the 20th-century's central conflict.”
Another title that tackles the entire conflict is Carlton's striking The Second World War Experience by Richard Overy. Published in four slipcased volumes covering 1939 to 1945, each book includes archival photos, interactive facsimile documents (letters, maps, charts, pamphlets) and CDs of oral histories.
An unusual take on WWII is being reprinted next month by Aquila Polonica. The Mermaid and the Messerschmitt, first published in 1942, is a rare eyewitness account of the war's early, chaotic days—the Nazi invasion of Poland, the Siege of Warsaw and the first few months of Nazi occupation—written by Rulka Langer, a civilian, a young Polish career woman and mother and a graduate of Vassar College.
Smith of Casemate is confident that there are still hundreds of first-hand accounts yet to come, particularly from the eastern front, where the Russians absorbed Germany's primary effort. He asserts that WWII as a category will never dry up because “due to the advent of nuclear weapons the idea of further conflicts of that kind became obsolete.” The eastern front is the subject of Casemate's The Men of Barbarossa: Commanders Who Led Nazi Germany's Invasion of the Soviet Union by Samuel Mitcham, which “adds to the literature of Germany's invasion of Russia, with in-depth descriptions of the most important commanders.”
St. Martin's senior editor Marc Res-nick has noticed that books about the U.S.'s current engagements in the Middle East are selling well, but he's also optimistic about The Remains of Company D: The Story of the Great War by James Carl Nelson. Researched and written for more than 10 years by the grandson of one of the infantry unit's members, the book follows the company from enlistment to combat and examines the postwar effect on the men.
“WWII is a core part of the Zenith Press program,” says executive editor Richard Kane. “With most history, particularly military history, it's the story that makes a good book.” Few stories can rival the ones told in The Enemy I Knew: German Jews in the Allied Military in World War II by Steven Karras (Oct.). The book collects 27 first-person narratives of German- and Austrian—born Jews who fled the Nazis and served as Allied soldiers.
Overlook's Operation Kronstadt: The True Story of Honor, Espionage, and the Rescue of Britain's Greatest Spy: The Man with a Hundred Faces by Harry Ferguson is packed with more drama than most fictional thrillers. According to the publisher, Operation Kronstadt “not only reveals the early days of Britain's intelligence services but uncovers a truly dramatic story from the Russian Revolution involving a daring rescue attempt and a mission impossible.”
With the amount of enthusiasm felt by readers and publishers of books on WWII, it is hard to imagine the subject losing its place at the top of the category. But the Department of Veterans Affairs lists the number of WWII veterans who die each day at 900. Each year more than 300,000 fewer firsthand accounts will exist. The compelling narratives that publishers claim rival Internet data are slowly petering out. Whether the category will be in serious jeopardy soon is unknown, but the large amount of free information online coupled with a prolonged recession makes one wonder if war and military publishing can sustain its current success.
For a list of books mentioned in this feature, go to www.publishersweekly.com/militarybooksbibliography.
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