Judith Curr, who runs the Atria and Washington Square Press imprints at Simon & Schuster, comes to the American marketplace from Australia, where, she says, "We had to go out and find our readers." And that's an approach she's brought with her, enthusiastically, to the States.
The very name of her Atria imprint, still building its identity as a new imprint at S&S, is about building relationships, and that's something she feels publishers have been guilty of failing to do with their readers.
"There's no such thing as a mass market any more," she says. "You have to go out and try to reach readers directly." She's full of ideas on how this can be done: "Publishing into specific cultural groups is an important element." Romance fiction, for example, she sees as one of the only purely literary forms left—where the material cannot be obtained in any other medium—and therefore is rightly seen as an area of promising expansion. "There's a lot of vigorous 'chick lit' publishing going on, Red Dress Ink, Downtown, and so on—and it's a very promising area, because there's a huge interconnectedness among the readers. They're in touch with each other, they have their own Web sites and publications, and with the right books you can do amazingly well. There's still too much snobbery in the business about romance publishing; we should be grateful it's there, helping support everything else we do."
That's not the only area where she sees untapped possibilities. As a keen golfer herself, she notes a complete lack of good golfing books for women—"It's as if we don't exist. And there's this common perception in New York that there are areas in the culture that can simply be written off for potential readerships. People interested in stock car racing, for instance—there are millions of them. I went to the NASCAR races in Atlanta not long ago, and there were people selling books there, stalls set up right at the track. It's a much more upscale readership than people think. Are the parking lots full of pickup trucks? No, it's at least partly a Lexus and BMW crowd, but you'd never know it from here."
Publishing to specific cultural groups should be an important element, Curr thinks, in publishers' efforts to expand the market: "What do they want to read?" S&S has begun to work with the Givens Foundation and its collection of African-American literature to publish a series of black classics as part of the foundation's effort to bring African American literature to the black community. Ultimately, Curr wonders if significant giveaways of books to stimulate reading interest among minority groups might be possible; meanwhile, the company is actively involved in Hispanic-American and African-American publishing, with Malaika Adero actively acquiring black authors for Atria's Cliff Street imprint.
How can publishers, with their comparatively limited promotional dollars, break through into national consciousness? "We've got to reinvent publicity. We can't rely on national TV programs any more—it's not only Oprah giving up her club; lots of the shows don't give the kind of space to authors they used to. So we have to find other ways to get the word out."
She cites Russell Simmons's Def Poetry Jam, currently making waves on Broadway (S&S is publishing a tie-in book) as an example of reaching a new, unexpected audience. "Couldn't we cooperate with the chains in doing poetry slams, maybe using their cafes? It's worth exploring." She observes, too, that whereas book publicists often manage to get authors and books into newspapers' style sections, it's a lot harder to crack the sports sections, though coverage of sports-related titles certainly belongs there, and they are probably the best-read sections in most newspapers.
She has lots of other ideas about how reading awareness could be enhanced. Book racks at airports could be organized by titles suitable for the length of the trip the potential buyer is making, for instance. Publishers could even do outreach into churches, with mailings or CDs offering "preacher's guides" for the current inspirational or other books. S&S, like other publishers, already provides brief reader's guides in some titles, notably in the back of Washington Square Press paperbacks.
Her house recently hosted a clever book party for Jennifer Weiner's comic romance In Her Shoes at a Kenneth Cole shoe store in New York City's fashionable SoHo neighborhood, where attendees bought books and shoes, and heard the author read. Curr explains, "Everyone wins in something like that. What we need to do more of these sorts of promotions isn't money, it's time. There's never enough of that."
As for such national consciousness-raising efforts as the AAP's "Get Caught Reading" promotion, "it's fine as far as it goes, but with the money at our disposal, it's not far enough. Couldn't we manage to work together on it with some major national advertiser that would like the association with books and reading? And we could do more with the big selling days. Why not a 'Give Your Son a Book' promotion for Father's Day?"
She goes on: "It's all about making books exciting. With a celebrity book like Marlo Thomas's The Right Words at the Right Time, for instance, or country music star Tim McGraw's Tim McGraw and the Dancehall Doctors, you're reaching a great big first-time readership, and you can try all sorts of new distribution ideas. On the McGraw, for instance, we sold 50,000 copies to Walmart. There are people who buy books for lots of reasons other than prestige, or being able to discuss the authors. They may want them for keepsakes, or they're looking for autobiographies that tell the stories of a particular age or time they can identify with."
Curr finds some of the standard measures of publishing success distinctly lacking. "Bestsellers have become too much of a holy grail," she declares. "I think it gives us a distorted sense of what publishing is all about. How about all those books you see being sold on the street, for instance—they just don't figure on the radar of our sales, but they should. What sells there, and why?"
She gets swept away by her almost messianic enthusiasm. "We've got to be able to convince people that books are interesting, exciting, accessible and not too expensive—and they're something you can feel virtuous about, and there aren't too many consumer items like that!"
Jan Nathan at California-based Publishers Marketing Association, now 3,600 members strong, is keenly aware of the problem of declining readership, and, feisty as ever, she is working on a solution involving her members, most of them small independent publishers.
The PMA, celebrating its 20th year of operation this year, plans to give away one million books in 2003 to encourage reading and literacy, working with such groups as the Rotarians, and is currently looking for a distribution center to handle the giveaway. They have decided, says Nathan, to concentrate on adult illiterates rather than children, because she sees the greatest need there. "Prisons and the military both have patterns of high illiteracy," she says, "and I think we should start there."
In Nathan's view, publishers have to provide education as well as entertainment if they are to remain in business, and one of the first essential benefits of reading is that it teaches self-sufficiency. To that end, the PMA launched a foundation called Literacy for Life, dedicated to the great giveaway, just before September 11, 2001. The program was put on hold for a while, but in the coming year it will go ahead in full force, beginning in California, then rolling out nationally.
Among the people the PMA has enlisted to help is John Corcoran, author of a book called The Teacher Who Couldn't Read (Brehon Publishing), his own remarkable story of how he kept his own illiteracy a secret even as he was teaching others; he is an expert on the problems faced by the illiterate in our society, and a fount of stories about those who have turned their lives around by learning to read.
Nathan rejoices in the efforts being made on behalf of the illiterate, especially children, but feels too many programs abandon them too soon. "They start kids off reading okay, but then they fall off at nine or 10 years old," she says. "If you could help as few as 10% of the people who fall off the reading wagon, it would be a great boon to our business."
Nathan firmly believes that attention to reading goes in cycles, with major distractions coming up one after the other, but always with an eventual return to an interest in the written word; "right now, it's the computer that's taking people's attention away from books." She's convinced, however, that, ultimately, the kind of concentration bred by Internet searches will actually intensify the desire to read. She notes the great ease of the young with the medium, and feels that "some material belongs online, like detailed reference, looking things up for school, but other kinds of material, like the Harry Potter stories, will always take them back to books, and the use of their imagination."
Nathan is also cheered by the prospect the Web offers of bringing many books back into print. She explains, "I think of the new media not as replacing books but intensifying the movement of information into people's hands, and therefore increasing publisher strength. Whatever form can bring information to people is, in essence, a book. There are so many options open to us now as publishers that we have to figure out which medium is best for our message. Directories, especially ones that require a lot of updating, are obviously now impractical as books, but the Great American Novel or poetry will always be between covers."
In the end, Nathan believes, as President Roosevelt told Americans in a celebrated WWII speech, that the main thing publishers have to fear is fear itself. "I think we'll be fine as long as we don't get stuck in the trenches with our heads down, scared that we can't do anything. This is a profession I adore. Where else do you get a daily thrill of discovery?"
