Selling books on nature and the environment is like getting a two-year-old to eat vegetables," says Amanda Cook, senior editor at Basic Books. "It's hard for people to get as excited about these topics as they would about a cookbook or a novel," concurs Helen Cherullo, publisher of The Mountaineers Books, "but it's incumbent upon us as publishers to figure out a way to bridge that."
Despite agreement that titles in this publishing arena are a hard sell, such books are holding their own in a weak economy, and that measured success is more than a simple case of diminished expectations. Consumers are seeking comfort in titles on nature and the environment. As Houghton Mifflin associate director of guidebooks Lisa White puts it, "In times of war, literature about nature and books like field guides may be a solace to people."
For the Birds
Field guides, primarily to our avian friends, are the backbone of the category, and birding is booming. A September 2002 article in Bird Calls, the newsletter of the American Bird Conservancy, reports that a 2001 U.S. Bureau of Census survey shows the number of active birders increased from 42.1 million in 1996 to 46 million in 2001. In 2001 66 million Americans participated in wildlife observation and spent $34 billion on the hobby.
Presumably a healthy portion of that expenditure went to field guides, which boast a long history. John James Audubon, the brand name in this sector, published Birds of America in 1838. Today Knopf publishes the Audubon guides, and there are 59 in the series.
Knopf also publishes the Sibley guides by David Allen Sibley, which use paintings rather than photographs for identification. The Sibley Guide to Birds, published in 2000, now has more than 600,000 copies in print. That was followed by The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior, and Sibley's Birding Basics. Next month brings The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America and The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America.
The Peterson Field Guides from Houghton Mifflin, established by Roger Tory Peterson in 1934, are the other standard-bearers. Sales remain steady despite the weak economy, says White, and the publishing plan for the Peterson's guides remains unchanged, as they are commissioned far in advance. In 2001 Houghton Mifflin also launched the Kaufman Focus Guides series with Birds of North America and last month released a second title, Butterflies of North America. "Next year we'll add mammals," says White. "There are lots and lots of hard-core birders and some serious butterfly watchers, but we think the mammal guide might appeal to people with a more casual interest in nature."
HarperResource publishes the American Bird Conservancy series (the flagship title, All the Birds of North America, has 250,000 copies in print) and the Cornell Bird Library series (which adds The Wildlife Gardener's Guide to Hummingbirds in March). The publisher hopes that a June photo field guide, HarperCollins Complete North American Wildlife, will spawn yet another series. "It's all in one volume," explains HarperResource editorial director Megan Newman. "If you don't want to carry around four books, this squeezes a lot of stuff into one portable book."
Another hefty volume is due in October from Timber Press—Joel Holloway's 240-page Dictionary of Birds of the United States. The September Random House paperback, The American Bird Conservancy's Top 500 Bird Sites in the U.S. serves as a guide to birds' favorite spots rather than to species. There are also guides to insects, plants (Wild Orchids of North America, North of Mexico, University Press of Florida, Mar.) and even items unmentionable in polite society. Jay Cassell, editorial director of the Globe Pequot imprint Lyons Press reports, "We're working on an encyclopedia of tracks and scats, because people are going out in the woods and picking flowers or wild mushrooms and they want to learn about what's out there." For Anglophile wildlife watchers, Trafalgar Square is now distributing Weidenfeld Nicolson's Fauna Britannica: The Practical Guide to Wild and Domestic Creatures of Britain (Mar.).
And at least one forthcoming reference work seems clearly designed to be consulted at home rather than toted into the field: Routledge's three-volume Encyclopedia of World Environmental History, being published in July. Yet another biggie: those wondering whoo's on first need only check out the wise owl on the cover of last week's PW, announcing the Firefly Encyclopedia of Birds, edited by Christopher Perrins. This 640-page tome (priced at $59.95) boasts a 30,000-copy announced first print and a $50,000 promotional budget.
Animals, Insects and a Few Fish
Beyond field guides, all kinds of animals are of interest, as illustrated by two diverse December titles from Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill: Amy Stewart's The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms; and F. Schuyler Mathews's The Music of Wild Birds, with scale compositions that can be played on a piano or sung. (Interestingly, the Mathews title was originally published in the late 19th-century; Algonquin's revised edition will feature vibrant new artwork by illustrator Judy Pelikan.) Algonquin publisher Elizabeth Scharlatt makes a point that's true of many books in this category—although initial print runs may be modest, reprints often add up to substantial numbers. "We will probably start with printings of 12,000 to 15,000 of Amy's book, and 15,000 to 20,000 of Wild Birds . Since such books of ours often turn out to sell better than buyers imagined, we usually have to go back to press fairly quickly. For example, of two previous books rooted in the natural world that have become backlist staples for us, both started out with modest printings. Diana Wells's 100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names, which we did in 1997, now has more than 100,000 copies in print and her second book, 100 Birds and How They Got Their Names, published in 2001, is so far around 40,000 copies."
In July, Lyons Press will focus on domestic rather than wild birds with The Mating and Breeding of Poultry. And Sharman Apt Russell discusses other flying creatures in next month's An Obsession with Butterflies. According to Basic Books senior editor Amanda Cook, "The author makes the point that you can find solace in your own backyard."
Even animals not as aesthetically pleasing as butterflies merit their own titles. Jungle Bugs: Masters of Camouflage and Mimicry (Firefly, Apr.) by Bruce Purser offers 300 photographs. In July, Texas A&M University Press will publish Insects of the Texas Lost Pines by Stephen Welton Taber and Scott B. Fleenor and Of Golden Toads and Serpents' Roads by Paul Freed. And Mysterious Manatees (University Press of Florida, June, a co-publication with the Center for American Places) by John E. Reynolds III, studies this endearingly lumpy animal's underwater existence.
Fish books also seem to be, well, in the fishbowl. This year Barron's adds two aquarium books, Encyclopedia of Aquarium Plants (Mar.) and Aquarium Designs Inspired by Nature (Apr.). Firefly will publish the Complete Encyclopedia of the Saltwater Aquarium in September. "People who are interested in nature who can't travel are hand-rearing parrots or creating sophisticated aquaria and bringing nature into their homes as much as possible," says Firefly publisher Lionel Koffler. "For some species, captive breeding is the future."
Indeed, preserving and protecting animals weighs on the minds of authors in this category. In Dominion (St. Martin's, Oct. 2002), Matthew Scully makes the argument that humans have a responsibility to treat animals with compassion. The book is now in its eighth printing, and the publisher will issue a paperback edition in the fall. Also in the realm of animal defense is Paul Watson's Seal Wars: Twenty-five Years on the Front Lines with Harp Seals (Firefly). In February, the University of Massachusetts Press published Jan E. Dizard's Mortal Stakes: Hunters and Hunting in Contemporary America .
Regional Specialization
"Think globally, publish locally," might be publishers' environmental slogan, with titles such as An Outdoor Guide to Bartram's Travels (Univ. of Georgia Press, Apr.) that lend themselves to regional organization. The recent decrease in travel by Americans is also encouraging a focus on limited areas. "There's a general feeling of paranoia out there. People want to stay close to home," says Dan Forrest-Bank, managing editor at Fulcrum Publishing in Colorado, which dedicates 30%—40% of its list to outdoor activities, with many titles, including Rocky Mountain Wildflowers (May), focusing on the West.
David Perry is editor-in-chief of the University of North Carolina Press, which publishes regional natural history guides such as Sharks, Skates, and Rays of the Carolinas (June), in addition to nonfiction titles on environmental history. As he puts it, "The pies are getting sliced into smaller slices. Before you might have had a book on birds of the Southeast, and now you might find one on birds in the Great Smokies."
Booksellers agree that the nature category lends itself to regional books. At Chapter One Book Store, a 3,200-square-foot store in Hamilton, Mont., co-owner Russ Lawrence notes, "When I'm buying for the nature section, a book almost has to have either a regional hook or a well-known author." A self-published local hiking guide, Hiking the Bitterroots, consistently remains in the store's top 10 best-selling books. Although he's had good luck with general topics (last year he sold two dozen copies of Scribner's A Primate's Memoir), Lawrence doesn't look to big publishers for regional books, either. "Large publishers look at the potential market, and if there aren't 100,000 readers they're not interested," he says. "Montana certainly isn't going to offer 100,000 pairs of eyeballs."
At The Book Rack in Essex Junction, Vt., owner Mike DeSanto sees the same tilt toward local information: "Because we're so parochial, our bestselling nature book last year was a book called Wildflowers of Vermont published by a local woman who promoted it herself. We sold 65 copies of that."
For Timber Press of Portland, Ore., the focus on regional titles is new. "We're experimenting," says publicity manager Debby Garman. "We've been primarily a gardening and horticulture publisher for 25 years, but this region is extraordinarily gifted naturally, and during a recent strategic planning session, the idea of regional titles started percolating." Among the 50-plus titles that Timber publishes every year, there's room for both international reference (Edible and Poisonous Mushrooms of the World) and local interest (In Search of Ancient Oregon: A Geological and Natural History); both titles are scheduled for September.
The Oregon State University Press also focuses on books on nature and the outdoors. About one-third to one-half of the press's list is devoted to nature books such as the April titles Paradise Wild: Reimagining American Nature by David Oates and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer. These are trade titles with academic crossover potential. "Course adoption is not crucial, but it helps ensure that we'll keep a book in print a lot longer," says acquisitions editor Mary Elizabeth Braun.
Firefly Books, too, often takes a regional tack with its nature books, including two April titles, Sparrows and Finches of the Great Lakes Region and Eastern North America and Warblers of the Great Lakes Region and Eastern North America, both by Chris Earley. Regional doesn't mean amateurish, however. "The old model, which was to put 180 pictures of bears in a book with 10,000 words of text and call it the 'world encyclopedia of bears' doesn't work anymore," explains Koffler. "The public is much more sophisticated than 15 or 20 years ago, and they demand more content." The Internet, he adds, is forcing publishers to offer greater depth of information in order to compete.
The California Natural History Guides series from the University of California Press, which dates back to 1959, was just relaunched in February. In addition to traditional field guides, the 60-volume series now includes introductory guides. Doris Kretschmer, executive editor in life sciences, says those guides "don't focus as much on identification and they're not as schematic in their organization. They're meant to be read straight through. When they do describe individual species like horned lizards, they do it in a conversational, discursive way." In May the series will add Sharks, Rays and Chimeras of California, Dragonflies and Damselflies of California and Introduction to Trees of the San Francisco Bay Region.
Nonfiction Narratives: A Mixed Bag
If field guides are the backbone of this category, than nonfiction studies are its hand—sometimes gently pointing out missteps, and sometimes raised in a fist out of frustration.
This year's surprise environmental hit is undoubtedly Bernd Heinrich's Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival, published by Ecco in January. Marketing director Carrie Kania reports that there are 40,000 copies in print after three months, "a very strong number for a nature book." Kania points to the title's originality as a strong selling point: "There aren't 28 books published every year on why animals hibernate." (This year, as it happens, there's another: Sleep and Rest in Animals by Corine Lacrampe, out this month from Firefly.)
Winter World may owe part of its success to its gentle subject matter, as so many books about the environment are sobering and even unsettling reads. Stephen Sloan's Ocean Bankruptcy, published this month by Lyons Press, sold out its 10,000-copy first printing almost immediately. "Because it's such an important book, we sent copies to every member of Congress," reports editorial director Jay Cassell. Also on the topic, Water Wars: Drought, Flood, Folly, and the Politics of Thirst (Riverhead, June) addresses water as an environmental issue and threatened resource.
Urban areas have their own environmental narratives. A March Houghton Mifflin release, Tilting at Mills: Green Dreams, Dirty Dealings, and the Corporate Squeeze by former New Yorker writer Lis Harris, chronicles the rise and fall of the construction of a paper mill in the Bronx. At Routledge, senior editor Ilene Kalish is working on a book about a community in the South plagued by environmental racism. "They're surrounded on all sides, and they feel like they're living in a 'toxic donut,' " says Kalish.
For the near term, Routledge will publish several nonfiction looks at the environment this spring, including Frederick Buell's From Apocalypse to Way of Life, a hard look at the current environmental crisis, and Reinventing Eden by Carolyn Merchant, which discusses the myth of the Garden of Eden and its role in the destruction of nature. Says Kalish, "There's been a trend of beautiful writing on food and travel, and I feel like nature is going to be the next subject."
Much of that beautiful food writing has come in the form of single-subject books such as Walker & Co.'s Cod (1997) and Salt (2002), both of which earned awards for their author, Mark Kurlansky. Now environmental writers seem to have caught the single-subject bug: in February, Perseus published Coal: A Human History by Barbara Freese. The book was a BookSense 76 pick, and the New York Times Book Review called it "engrossing and sometimes stunning" and applauded Freese for pointing out that coal has been useful, even while she lists the damage that it has done.
Not all the nonfiction accounts in this category are stories of disaster. Harmony publisher Shaye Areheart terms What I've Always Known: Living in Full Awareness of the Earth (Sept.) "a spiritual memoir." In the book, author Tom Harmer, a young white American, tells of his apprenticeship to a Salish Indian elder in northern Washington state. "I'm very concerned about the environment and the earth and what we're dong to it," says Areheart, "and I'm actively looking for books that will get the message out there."
Man vs. Nature
Two 1997 bestsellers, Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm (Norton, HarperPaperbacks) and Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air (Villard, Anchor) have often been credited with re-focusing attention on the peril of nature's extremes (Book News, "Man Against Nature"; July 14, 1997). The former title spent a total of 92 weeks on PW's bestseller lists, and Random House publicity director Tom Perry reports "just shy of two million" copies in print of Thin Air's combined hardcover and paperback editions.
Among the newer titles continuing in this vein are To the Top: Reaching for America's 50 State Summits (Creative Publishing International, Apr.), in which Nels Akerlund and Joe Glickman record their adventures spent during five years climbing to the highest point in each of the 50 states. In Spirit of the Rock (Gibbs Smith, Mar.), seasoned climber Ron Kauk offers practical advice and insights about nature.
In Good Morning Midnight: Life and Death in the Wild, (Riverhead, Apr.), author Chip Brown offers the biography of Guy Waterman, who 30 years ago left his job as a speechwriter at midlife and built a cabin in Vermont without any modern conveniences. Waterman went on to be considered the dean of the homesteading movement, but later committed "mountain suicide." Death in the Everglades: The Murder of Guy Bradley, America's First Martyr to Environmentalism (University Press of Florida, Nov.) harks back to the early days of the environmental movement.
Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius Who Discovered a New History of the Earth (Dutton, May) reaches back even further to recount the life of Nicholas Steno, a 17th-century scientist-cum-priest. Dutton senior editor Mitch Hoffman says, "Alan Cutler is able to tell this story in a way that's accessible to those of us who don't have Ph.D.s in philosophy or science. When you find someone who can do that, it's publishing manna from the heavens." The book has already been selected, he notes, as a Barnes & Noble Discover title.
Academia: The Natural Is (Often) Political
University presses, unconstrained by the profit demands of larger trade houses, are particularly active in this category. Clay Morgan, senior acquisitions editor in environmental studies and environmental science for the MIT Press, says, "Commercial publishers are looking to make big profits. And books on the environment, while there are exceptions, are not huge sellers, particularly serious works of science or scholarly books. Also, many publishers are conglomerates and a lot of books on the environment are fairly progressive. It's like the national news media—when outlets are owned by large corporations they tend to be more and more conservative."
One example of a book that a commercial press might hesitate to publish, whether because of its serious nature or because of its political implications, is the November MIT title Energy at the Crossroads: Global Perspectives and Uncertainties by Vaclav Smil. In Morgan's words, "The information in this book can be counted on as reliable, objective, and readable to a general audience, although it's not breezy reading."
The University of California Press publishes nonfiction books such as The Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty, Not Affluence, Is the Environment's Number One Enemy (Apr.) by Jack M. Hollander. According to Kretschmer, "Hollander is saying that instead of wringing our hands about how our rich nations are raping the environment, we should be focusing on trying to raise the standard of living in poorer and developing countries." The press had particular success last year with Dale Lott's American Bison, which immediately sold out its 4,000-copy first printing.
Due to its role as the home for the Institute of Ecology, the University of Georgia houses what University of Georgia Press associate director and editor-in-chief Nancy Grayson calls "the largest concentration of academic ecologists anywhere in the country." Still, the press's list includes trade titles intended for a broader audience, such as Colors of Africa, a travelogue, and The Pond Lovers, which serves as both a how-to guide for building ponds and a series of meditations on the wildlife that author Gene Logsdon observed in his own Ohio backyard.
Elsewhere on the university press front: the University Press of Kentucky's October title, The Essential Agrarian Reader: The Future of Culture, Community, and the Land gathers essays from 20th-century agrarians, and a July title from the State University of New York Press, Global Environmentalism and Local Politics, asserts that in order for conservation to be effective, it must be paired with social justice.
Activism on the Rise
The current administration's disregard for the environment appears to have stoked activism. Harmony's Areheart says, "With the party that's in power and their record on the environment, a lot of people are concerned, whether they're Republicans or Democrats, and they want to be better informed and involved."
One form of involvement is covered in Green Volunteers (part of a series from Universe/Rizzoli that also includes Archaeo-Volunteers and World Volunteers), due out this month. Series editor Fabio Ausenda says, "The book fills a communication gap between thousands of potential volunteers and hundreds of conservation projects which desperately need labor and funding." The price of the book includes unlimited updates from a Web site (www.greenvoluneers.org).
Chelsea Green Publishing Company in Vermont does its part by publishing a dozen or so titles a year on sustainable living. These include the practical, e.g., Back Garden Seed Saving (Feb.), as well as more cerebral volumes such as This Organic Life by Joan Dye Gussow, released in paperback in September 2002. "We'd like to start to do some books that have a more activist slant," says publicity director Alice Blackmer. "There's a sense that maybe in the '80s and '90s we got complacent. The time to inspire people is now."
Activist authors have found a home at four-year-old Lantern Books, where half the annual list of 30 or so books is dedicated to nature and animals. In July, Lantern will publish Growing America by David A. Kidd, a Vietnam veteran who founded an organization that has planted 12 million trees to date. The Green Belt Movement, out this month, recounts the activities of a similar group in Kenya. Says publishing director Martin Rowe, "These books show the personal aspect of making a difference, one tree at a time. People need to know that other people have done it and they can do it themselves."
Lantern doesn't just talk about tree conservation either—it actively participates. As a partner in the Green Press Initiative (www.greenpressinitiative.org), the press has pledged to print on recycled paper. Both titles use chlorine-free new-leaf ecostock, made of 100% post-consumer-waste recycled paper.
Photography books can serve as a powerful motivational tool. America's Wildlife Refuges: Lands of Promise (Graphic Arts Center, May) celebrates the centennial anniversary of our wildlife refuges and drives home how important they are. Similarly, Edge of Africa: All Life Is Here, published by Hydra in October in association with the Smithsonian's Biodiversity Group, contains both wildlife photography and text about Shell's Gabon Diversity Project.
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land (Mountaineers, Apr.) had visible political impact. First, with subsidies and grants, the press managed to keep the price to a low $35 for the hardcover and $22.95 for the trade paperback, making it accessible. Then, says Helen Cherullo, "Right before the vote where we won a stay of execution against oil drilling in the Arctic refuge, Senator Barbara Boxer held up our book on the Senate floor. I've always dreamed of doing a book that would change the world, and I felt we had."
