"Serializing a novel is a very old process. People trace it back to Dickens," Fred Ramey, Unbridled Books' copublisher, explains, while discussing the 18-month-old literary press's latest venture: the serialization of Golem Song, the fall 2006 release by Marc Estrin, author of Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa and The Education of Arnold Hitler. Ramey, a veteran of reinvention, is still teaming with Greg Michalson, and Unbridled is the third house they have run together. In every instance, they have made a splash by mixing an editorially driven list with technological savvy. "We're old-fashioned, hands-on," says Ramey, between references to Dickens and bandwidth.
The first three chapters of Golem Song, which features a manic character who believes he has been chosen to deliver America from anti-Semitism, will be available online on May 8, with a chapter posted each week; the final chapter will coincide with the publication of the book. Serialization costs $8.95, while for $15.95, buyers get serialization plus a signed copy of the book, which appears in trade paper in November. Unbridled is not the first to give serialization a try. Stephen King famously tried it a few years back, but abandoned the effort mid-book. A few other smaller houses have serialized for pay online, but Golem Song is perhaps the most prominent literary effort yet.
Drawing attention to their list without being bound by geographic constraints or expending a lot of resources is nothing new for industry veterans Ramey and copublisher Michalson, who launched Unbridled from two locations more than 700 miles apart in 2004. Although Ramey lives in Colorado and Michalson lives in Missouri, the two have partnered across the Great Plains for more than a decade, initially as publisher (Ramey) and senior editor (Michalson) at Denver-based MacMurray & Beck from 1993 to 1999, producing critically acclaimed sleeper bestsellers that branded the small house early on as a literary press powerhouse, such as The Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland, which sold 60,000 copies before the paperback rights were sold to Viking, and The Hummingbird House by Patricia Henley, a 1999 National Book Award finalist.
After leaving MacMurray & Beck in 1999 when Ramey's attempts to purchase it from its seller, owner Mary Hughes Scott, fell through, Ramey and Michalson were recruited by Penguin Putnam publisher Phyllis Grann to continue their long-distance professional partnership by launching a literary imprint, BlueHen, from their home offices in America's heartland. "They have a talent, an access to great writers that we in New York City don't have. I think Fred and Greg are extremely talented," Grann tells PW, adding that she considered—and still considers—the experiment a success.
However, despite receiving immediate critical attention with the 19 titles they published in three seasons, BlueHen folded soon after Grann left Putnam in 2002.
"Phyllis understood exactly the kind of publishing we wanted to do. She wanted us to publish books that had a chance to last. After she left, the new people did not get what we were doing. We didn't have the flexibility to do what we needed to do with the books. It just didn't work out," Michalson recalls.
Both Ramey and Michalson contend that, from their earliest days at MacMurray & Beck, they've done things differently from other publishers, though they consider their approach to publishing a traditional one. For instance, they've always focused upon implementing long-term marketing strategies designed to showcase their authors and slowly build niche audiences for books (primarily fiction) they consider to have lasting appeal. Thus, as a matter of course, Unbridled releases are heavily promoted up to a year or more after pub date, through their reissue in paper.
"What we're publishing is careers as well as individual titles," Ramey emphasizes. That 15% of MacMurray & Beck's authors followed Ramey and Michalson, first to BlueHen after MacMurray & Beck was sold to MacAdam/Cage seven years ago, and subsequently to Unbridled, while 45% of BlueHen's authors are now Unbridled authors, demonstrates that Ramey walks his talk. One author, Frederick Reuss, published his first two novels with Ramey at MacMurray & Beck, his third with Pantheon, but brought his fourth novel, Mohr, to Unbridled, which published it this month.
While claiming that he and Michalson simply are replicating at Unbridled what they did at MacMurray & Beck and BlueHen, Ramey acknowledges one essential difference, evident in the very name they've chosen for their latest incarnation. "We're unfettered, publishing the books we love, handling them the way we learned to handle them at MacMurray & Beck," Ramey declares, noting that the anonymous investor financing Unbridled has given the copublishers free rein to publish and promote their list as they see fit, even though their strategies may go against current industry norms.
Ramey ascribes his and Michalson's philosophy to the fact that, when he took the helm at the newly launched MacMurray & Beck in 1993, the book publishing industry was in a state of flux, brought about in large part by the emergence of the Internet, e-books, POD and its impact on traditional distribution systems, as well as the growth of the chains and contraction of independent bookstores.
"Technological changes were affecting us even as we were trying to define the business structure," Ramey recalls. "The changes in the industry forced us to be flexible in our approach to virtually every aspect of the industry. Our perspective was constantly changing because we were dancing on rapidly moving ground.
"The realities in publishing forced us to be bold," he concludes.
As early as 1998, MacMurray & Beck briefly experimented with e-books, offering a downloadable version of the novel Anxiety by Frederick Reuss on its Web site.
"The book seemed unique and playful enough to attract the savvy reader we imagined in those days: someone tech-happy enough to want an e-book and yet readerly enough to want a good e-book," Ramey says, conceding that the experiment was a failure, as few copies of the book were downloaded.
Despite their early setback with Anxiety, Ramey and Michalson contend that the evolution of an Internet culture in the past decade has been an essential component in their survival as an independent publisher located far away from the New York publishing and media orbit. In fact, they say, the Internet has enhanced their ability to fulfill their mission of connecting exciting new voices with an audience, by creating a virtual community of readers, eager to discuss literary fiction and nonfiction with publishers and authors as well as with each other. "Look at literary bloggers," Ramey declares. "They've demonstrated that books still matter. Literary bloggers have recreated the literary salon, except, now, a literary salon not bound by space, not bound by time."
