Trending much? Another small press scores a big award (but can they handle it?)

To be totally candid, I was more intrigued by last night's "Top Chef Just Desserts" finale than I was by the National Book Awards ceremony. I glanced at the twittering just enough to know that speakers were predictably verbose, Patti Smith was predictably fabulous, and another small press scored another big award when Jaimy Gordon's Lord of Misrule routed the big name fiction nominees.

It's a trending topic. Little engines that could.

The 2009 Pulitzer went to Paul Harding's Tinkers. And more recently, Johanna Skibsrud's The Sentimentalists took the prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize, having sold a grand 400 copies after it's release by teensy Gaspereau Press.

But here's a bit of a conundrum, as reported in The National:

An independent publishing house well known for its lovingly and painstakingly designed books, it is definitely a case of quality over quantity for the Novia Scotia-based publisher, which pressed a mere 2,000 extra copies of The Sentimentalists after it was longlisted for the annual prize. And with previous winners having gone on to sell tens of thousands of extra copies each as a result, Gaspereau Press's inability to publish more than 1,000 copies a week could prove to be a bit of a problem. Determined to keep its integrity intact, Gaspereau has also revealed it had turned down offers from several bigger publishers to help cope with rising demand for the book.

My initial reaction is that this small press is screwing their little author. Big time. Limping out with a thousand copies a week, they were killing what could be the greatest opportunity of her career. (I'm reminded of a friend whose novel was being vetted by Oprah's book club in the late '90s. The tiny lit press who published it turned up their nose at such a crassly commercial idea, declined to print the required number of copies, flat out refused to provide the 300 free copies for the Oprah studio audience, and rejected a big publisher's offer to step in and capitalize what would effectively be the corporate startup of this author's brand.)

But on second thought, I get where Gaspereau is coming from, and it does rub me the wrong way that a big publisher should sweep in and make boocoo bucks off a book for which they were unwilling to take the slightest risk. It trains them to headhunt authors from small presses instead of actually investing in old school author/editor partnerships.

So what may we extrapolate from all this?
1. Small presses rock. They are the future of fiction that doesn't involve vampires and the last hope for us so-called "midlist" authors who've been dumped on the Island of Misfit Toys by the big publishers who launched our careers.

2. Big presses still hold the key to distribution. But I see ebooks as an opportunity to change that. At the very least, The Sentimentalists should have been immediately available on Kindle and Nook. The catch is training readers of road-less-traveled fiction to seek it out in digital platforms when the vast, vast majority of ebooks available now are self-published, unedited, amateur schnauzer crap.

The happy ending for Skibsrud is that Gaspereau was blasted with harsh criticism for their constipated take on literary integrity at the expense of the writer, and they sold Canadian paperback rights to Douglas & McIntyre. She was quoted as being "really pleased" with the deal (Canadian for "elated"), and 30K copies are scheduled to ship tomorrow. Where there's life, there's hope.

Tinkers, not by Chance

Whatever it means to be beside oneself, that's what I've been--beside myself with hope and possibility--since Paul Harding's Tinkers won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction last week. I'm still trying to get my hands on a copy.

I understand from the NPR story that a member of the Pulitzer Committee contacted Mr. Harding and asked him to submit the novel for the prize. I wonder whether, at the time, the Committee realized how significant it would be in today's publishing environment to award the prize to a novel published by Bellevue Literary Press.

It is a remarkable moment. Commenters cite the last such award as that for A Confederacy of Dunces in 1981--but that novel was published by a university press (LSU), which I think we can view as something categorically different.

Following solid pre-publication trade reviews for Tinkers, LA Times reviewer Susan Salter Reynolds, in a brief review, called the book "astonishing." Considerable credit should go to Ms. Salter and the LA Times for taking note of this small-press book so early.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer picked up on PW's praise in early January. And then came a wash of wonderful reviews in The New Yorker, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Dallas Morning News, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, and The Boston Globe and from a good number of the best online reviewers. (Though I don't think the NYT or The Washington Post found the book--please correct me if I'm wrong.)

Something was happening that turned the eyes of some important reviewers toward a word-of-mouth book from a publishing house established in 2005. One can only cheer. Bellevue Literary Press has published only a few works of fiction--beautifully chosen by editorial director Erika Goldman. I'm not naive enough to think that the reviews and the Pulitzer Committee's nod mark a widening of the vision in the mainstream book press, but I remain hopeful that it is something other than an aberration. Some of the best fiction being published these days is handled by folks who live without a "big book" focus, without a celebrity publishing mentality. Much is happening in independent publishing--much has always been happening there. And I'm convinced that the future of American literature lies in bringing attention to all that.

My congratulations to Bellevue Literary Press, to Mr. Harding, to the Pulitzer Committee, and to those reviewers and booksellers who saw what they knew to be a fine work of fiction and championed it.

Cinderella Backstory (How a quiet novel from a small press scored the biggest prize in literature)

In the Boston Globe today, a great story on Tinkers, Paul Harding's small press novel that just won the Pulitzer:

For three years, Paul Harding’s unpublished novel, “Tinkers,’’ sat in a drawer. The writer, a former Boston rock drummer who grew up in Wenham, had tried selling it, but nobody was interested.

“I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll be a writer who doesn’t publish,’ ’’ Harding, 42, said this week, a day after “Tinkers’’ earned him the Pulitzer Prize for fiction — the first book by a small publisher to do so in nearly three decades.

Click here to read the rest.