Consortium Book Sales & Distribution is adding five publishers this spring and summer. According to sales and marketing director Jim Nichols, "We don't want to grow too fast. Our active list of clients is about 75." Consortium's new clients vary from new presses such as London-based Dazed Books, which publishes the internationally renowned fashion magazine Dazed & Confused, to Tara Publishing, which is run by a group of writers in India. Other publishers include three-year-old Hawthorne Books in Portland, Ore., which does four to six books a year of literary fiction and narrative nonfiction; True Mind in New York City, which publishes books about mystical practices; and Verse Press in Florence, Mass., which publishes contemporary American poetry and Verse magazine.
"Sales are up a solid 5% for the year," says Laura Moriarty, acquisition and marketing director of nonprofit Small Press Distribution in Berkeley, Calif., which has added two new presses, Clear Cut Press in Oregon, which prints its books in Japan, and U.K.—based Salt Publishing, publisher of Venezuelan poet Eugenio Montejo's The Trees: Selected Poems 1967—2000, which includes the poem featured in the film 21 Grams.
The University of Michigan Press announced that it will add British publisher Pluto Press starting this fall as part of a new focus on books of political and international interest. Pluto publishes 70 books a year and has a backlist of 400 titles, including Loretta Napoleoni's Modern Jihad: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks and Milan Rai's Regime Unchanged: Why the War on Iraq Changed Nothing. UMP's other clients include The American Academy in Rome, K.G. Saur Verlag, and the Center for Chinese Studies and the Centers for South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Michigan.
