>I'm sure you're right, just not as *thoroughly right* as you
>believe. In other
>words, despite the existence of overwhelming, mass consumed, ultra
>polished spectacle, there's still plenty of low art produced. I think
>however, that it's taking forms and happening in places lots of people
>who're concerned about this sort of thing are missing....or dismissing
>because it doesn't fit qualifying preconceptions.
I can think of a lot of stuff that's better than ever. One example in the front of my mind because the new issue just came in the mail is a magazine called Cabinet. It comes in a wonderful brown wrapper that's all taped up so opening it takes a little time and it's like getting a gift from a friend who knows just what you like.
And there's Akashic Books, proving every day that little engines still can. Earlier this year I bought some books at the Akashic booth at a big annual book fair at UCLA. I didn't realize until later when I saw a picture of him that Johnny Temple was one of the people manning the booth. I got this great book called Jesus Boy and he said "that's a really good book, thank you for buying it."
http://www.akashicbooks.com/index.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/arts/12iht-blume.4182422.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
So why shouldn't Johnny Temple, who plays bass in the rock group Girls Against Boys (popularly known as GVSB), start publishing books?
In a handful of years Temple has become as big in independent publishing as in indie rock. His authors, mostly marginal or barely known, show up increasingly in New York Times reviews and while his imprint, Akashic Books, camps with a staff of four in a scruffy room in the former American Can Factory in Brooklyn, Temple features as a so-called Originator in a glossy whiskey ad in The New Yorker's winter fiction issue.
One of the slogans of Akashic (Sanskrit for a giant library) is "a cure for the common novel." Its other slogan is "reverse-gentrification of the literary world," which Temple qualifies as fairly tongue-in-cheek. "I think that literature should be consumed by more than just the well-educated," Temple said. "Reverse gentrification is the notion that we don't need to just keep trying to sell books to the same people, these people for sure but also more of the population."
This means that Akashic's books are as likely to be sold off tables on street corners as in major chains. Of the 25 books the imprint publishes each year, a large proportion comes from what Temple calls the African diaspora, including Jamaican writers for whom Temple has had a passion since his high school days; the Nigerian activist and novelist Chris Abani, who won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in 2004; and Amiri Baraka, the former '60s playwright LeRoi Jones, whose new Akashic book was just named a New York Times editor's choice.
More commercially, Temple has started a geographical series of short crime stories, which started with "Brooklyn Noir" and will eventually stretch to cities on four continents. He published the veteran journalist Robert Scheer, with blurbs from Joan Didion and Gore Vidal, and had a smashing best seller when Barnes and Noble's senior fiction buyer took a shine to "Hairstyles of the Damned," a novel by Joe Meno that reads like Holden Caulfield on controlled substances.
Temple even beat out the big publishers when he snagged "The Uncomfortable Dead," a thriller co-authored by the Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos.
"I was able to make a very creative offer that surprised the hell out of all the major conglomerates and other independents that were vying for this book. I didn't know who I was competing against."
"I don't like to compete for books," Temple added. "My main mission is to publish books that don't have homes elsewhere. I don't want to be redundant, I want to be finding books or, like the noir series, creating a new concept."
A rangy 40-year-old family man who lives in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, Temple was born in Washington, where his mother was a public defender and his father ran the local branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. After a degree in African-American studies, he completed a master's at Columbia in social work.
"I loved social work, I loved working with juvenile delinquents, that was my area of focus," Temple said. "It was right when I was taking my degree that the rock band I was playing with at the time was taking off. I was sort of at a crossroads and I picked rock 'n' roll because I could return to social work, and I still could, but I knew I could never return to rock 'n' roll."
GVSB did well enough on the rock circuit to win a contract with a major label, which didn't know what to do with the group and finally bought them out. Temple put up his share to start Akashic and applies what he learned working with independent labels to the book business, right down to using punk rocker designers of album covers for some of his books.
"My experience in rock totally informs my publishing, but you would never say reverse gentrification of the music world because there is no gentrification of the music world. I feel that the books we're publishing are just as exciting and dynamic as the music in my band."
Financially, he borrowed his royalty structure from the profit spread employed by some indie record labels. Writers get very small advances but an enhanced royalty scheme that gives them half the book's profit. "Not half the income, half the profit," Temple said. "The contract always spells out exactly what profit is. For books that sell more than 5,000 copies, it works better per book than any royalty rate I know of."
Akashic is just breaking even, thanks to creative penny-pinching. Instead of costly ad campaigns, authors go on the road to promote their books from inexpensive hotels and drive themselves rather than travel by air. Venues can be off the beaten track: the Straight Out of Harlem Gallery, the Democratic Club of Conejo Valley, Art Prostitute in Denton, Texas. One author came with a baton twirler.
To a point Temple in effect auditions authors because the collaboration is so close. "There's got to be mutual trust, so if I'm signing up a book I want to have a good sense of that author. I'm going to call people who know them because I don't care if you sell 100,000 books, if you're going to be a jerk to us we don't want to work with you."
Every byte of copy is gone over with the author and each book gets its marketing plan. "One of the services we provide writers is being very responsive, or trying to be. They have to understand that we're on a limited budget but beyond that they're going to get a lot of personal care from us." When, for example, it came to a reprint of the 1976 Vietnam war classic, "Born on the Fourth of July," the book's author, Ron Kovic, chose Akashic because the book's original cover made him sick.
"He felt like he'd been shot again," Temple said. "The reason we got this book, which is still being read in universities, was that it was so important to Ron that the cover looked exactly how he wanted it."
Next month Temple will go back to rocking out when GVSB, which has been inactive, opens the first of two European tours in Milan. "It's totally bizarre to go back on the road. One thing though is that I probably work as many hours in book publishing when I'm on the road as I do here," he said. "It's so much a part of who I am that if you look at our music videos there are videos where I'm holding manuscripts.
"It's a kind of tongue-in-cheek thing but it's still, Johnny we're rolling again, come on back. Just bring the manuscript with you."