Ten years after Dan Simon launched Seven Stories Press, the independent house continues to succeed with an inventive publishing mix of political activism, high-minded literary works and the occasional bestseller. "We're an activist-oriented publisher," Simon said, "an alternative to academia and a permanent part of the literary map. We offer serious books that sell."
Led by Kurt Vonnegut's bestselling A Man Without a Country, which sold 250,000 copies, and the late Octavia Butler's Fledgling, which sold more than 20,000 copies, Seven Stories' sales doubled in 2005, and Simon acknowledged that the company will have a difficult time matching last year's revenue level in this anniversary year. Still, Simon has made important additions this year, including the September appointment of Amy Scholder, former U.S. publisher of Verso, as executive editor.
Forthcoming titles focus on the house's specialty—political discontent. Censored '06: Top 25 Censored Stories, published in 2005, sold 20,000 copies, and Censored '07 is just out. Scholder is editing Dr. Rice in the House, an anthology due in the spring that is critical of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
And then there are SSP's "political interventions," books like U.S. vs. George Bush, a quick turnaround title by Elizabeth de la Vega, a former federal prosecutor who presents a hypothetical legal indictment of the Bush administration for a long list of crimes. Simon said he likes to publish the most radical texts in the most traditional format. That's how he describes Typecasting, a 576-page hardcover (10,000 first printing) history of racial stereotyping by the iconoclastic academic husband and wife team Ewen & Ewen, published in October.
SSP's big book for the early spring is The Next Twenty-Five Years by intellectual property lawyer Martin Garbus, which offers a grim assessment of the current Supreme Court. On the literary front, Scholder has acquired Greed, a new novel by Elfriede Jelinek, last year's Nobel winner for literature.
Simon said that the SSP backlist accounts for about 50% of its annual sales, and foreign rights sales are an important part of the revenue mix. Course adoptions are also significant—Noam Chomsky's 9-11, Howard Zinn's People's History and the Censored series are in demand on campuses. To promote college sales, the house produces a separate college catalogue and maintains a database of 5,000 professors who use SSP titles.
"The way we publish books has a lot to do with Seven Stories' success," said Scholder, noting that they were able to convince Vonnegut "not to go to the Hamptons [where Vonnegut has a home]," and instead build a relationship with the media for A Man Without a Country. Vonnegut agreed, telling PW, "Dan Simon did for me what Jesus did for Lazarus. If not for Seven Stories, I wouldn't have published another book."
