It so happens that I was boarding a plane out of San Francisco when it was announced that Judith Regan is moving her imprint from New York to Los Angeles—and so I wasn't able to discuss it immediately with the 70 or so California publishers I'd met with the day before. But no matter: I could almost hear their ire echoing above the clouds. In trumpeting the Regan relocation, reports suggested that the move was all but unprecedented, and that "real" publishing rarely exists west of the Hudson, a notion that must have come as a bit of a surprise to more than a few companies.
Companies like, for example, Chronicle Books, the $30-million (or so) Bay Area publisher responsible for last year’s triumphant The Beatles Anthology, among many others; like PGW, the Berkeley-based distributor that represents more than 100 small and medium-sized houses (including Grove Atlantic, though most PGW distributees live significantly west of the Morgan/Regan line); like MacAdam/ Cage, whose The Time Traveler’s Wife was a longtime bestseller in hardcover and is now doing well in Harcourt trade paperback. And what about Harper San Francisco, a News Corp.—owned Regan sibling, and publisher of many bestselling religion and spirituality titles? In other words, thinking people have always known that publishing is alive and well and living on the Fault Line—it’s not news that there’s publishing gold in them thar hills.
"Regan is bringing book culture to California?! That's a laugh," one small L.A.—based publisher said to me the next day. "What does she think we've been doing here all this time?" (One interesting factoid: the company that invented Mad Libs, now bought and sold through the Penguin Group (USA), was started by a family publishing house in L.A.) And while it's true that there probably hasn't been a book publisher out there with exactly Regan's je ne sais quoi, it's arguable that Regan actually has always been a Hollywoodish publisher—blockbusters! Tabloid stories! Good-girls gone wrong!—inexplicably marooned in the East. Regan has been literally and figuratively living in Hollywood for so long—some agents know to try her first at the Beverly Wilshire hotel—that you could say she isn't so much blazing a trail as finally settling down.
But all this obscures the fact that there is a lot of publishing that goes on west (and south) of the Hudson. And lately, some of those non—New York publishers (NNYP) have been pretty successful. There's Regnery Publishing, once based in the Midwest and now in D.C., which—no matter what you might think of its politics—put four books on the bestseller list last year. There's religion publisher Thomas Nelson, out of Nashville. And Chicago's SourceBooks, which, according to publisher Dominique Raccah, employs 60 people, publishes some 180 books a year and is up 30% the first quarter of 2005. And you can't forget suburban Chicago distributor IPG, owned by Chicago Review Press, or Florida-based Health Communications Inc., which has made a fortune on the Chicken Soup books. In fact, according to R.R. Bowker's Books in Print database, of the 81,000 publishers in business in the United States, only 3,417 of them are based in New York City. What this should say to us smug New Yorkers is obvious: cool as we are, we're not really the center of the universe (see: Election, presidential, 2004) and we may not have our fingers so precisely on the American pulse anymore. But the clearer this becomes, the harder we dig in our heels, insisting that in fact we still do rule the publishing world. What else would explain the last-minute embrace of Judith Regan as "one of us."
On the other hand, while I sympathize with the NNYP, also known as the respect-free Rodney Dangerfields of the book business, I can't help but think that they wouldn't have it any other way. As outsiders of the so-called mainstream, as the indie producers to the publishing studio system, they can not only create and market what and how they want, they can also revel in their maverick status and put down the very system that gave rise to them.
You could say that they're determined and relentless and argumentative and very, very proud. But then, that would be admitting that in the end, they're a lot like those big bad corporate book people on the other side of the Hudson. Which would make us all the same, now, wouldn't it? Apparently, we all share a similar belief—that we are doing something very special in some very special place.
Wherever that is.
