The main buzz around Torrey House was that Charlie Quimby’s Monument Road had just been selected as one of 12 titles in the American Booksellers Association’s Celebrate Debut Authors with Indies promotion.  The ABA’s BookExpo America (BEA) conference is at the end of this month and they would like Charlie to be there and CBSD urges one of us from THP to go.  So the rush is on and Kirsten is headed back to New York to tout our wares at BEA.  More on this after the ABA announcement coming up in a few days.

We learned a few more tidbits in the breakout sessions.  I was wondering if we have any ability to change e-book prices once the print book price is set and the answer is yes, we do.  We will experiment at some point a bit with that.  We were also wondering if independent booksellers could see our titles on Above the Treeline’s popular interactive publisher catalog Edelweiss, and the answer again is as of just recently, yes they can.  In the session on e-books I was heartened to hear that Amazon’s rapacious growth in market share is plateauing as well as the that of e-books in general.  A big question I would like to blog about later is if Wall Street will ever require Amazon to be profitable.  I think it will and when that happens the stock price will plunge and the playing field will be leveled a bit.  But it hasn’t happened yet.  There was also a  session about getting publicity but maybe not enough about effective publicity.

I admit I’d rather go camping, or just about anything for that matter, than go to New York.  It is a personal failing.  But the weather was gorgeous and I got to hang with my favorite editor, meet some other publishers, get an industry update, and tout our wares.   The first day while Kirsten was meeting with Publishers Weekly and Library Journal, I walked from our hotel on 34th to the conference at The Poet’s House down by the new World Trade Center building, about 3 miles.  Part of my walk was on the new High Line walkway, a converted elevated train track with lots of trees and native flora.  The thing was jammed with people, many with cameras, seemingly overwhelmed by all the green growing things.  See?  Even in the big city, folks are aching for a little more natural landscape in their lives. Love of the land. -Mark Bailey

Our title, The Legend’s Daughter, by David Kranes is out.  Kranes’ stories are so good  he was recently asked for permission to publish his short story “Theresa” in an anthology of contemporary literature selected and translated by Haruki Murakami. Some of the other authors to be included in the anthology are Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Alice Munro, Maile Maloy, Peter Stamm, Lauren Groff, and Jim Shepard.  That is impressive company.  But not impressive enough to move the sales needle.

Jana Richman’s The Ordinary Truth, a story about water and the West, recently was well reviewed by Michael Englehard in High Country News, a magazine “for people who love the West.”  We were delighted — thank you HCN! — yet again the sales needle did not move.

You get the picture.  We are going to continue to publish excellent literary fiction because it is what we love.  But we plan to cut it back to one book in eight instead of the other way around.  Our goal as an environmental publisher is to add to the cultural conversation in such a way that more water is left in the streams and more wildflowers on the mountains.  Because topical nonfiction can better reach an audience, we are going to lean in that direction.

Environmentalism tends to be a progressive cause.  It is an oddity in our western culture that conservatives are not into conservation.  Extraction, consumption and anti-environmentalism is essentially a political platform for the right.  Environmentalism, on the other hand, quickly leads to the progressive notions of social justice, ecological economics, sustainable living methods, feminism, green and natural community building, conscientious commerce, renewable energy, healthy food production, and the happy, compatible lifestyles that go with it.   To manage on the planet with 7 billion souls and growing we need ideas and we will be looking for the people with them.  We want to do our part to get these progressive ideas into the conversation by publishing books about them.  Our nonfiction titles coming up are a start in that direction and we want to do more.

We are also expanding into two new genres, mystery and young adult.  We are delighted to have a contract with Scott Graham of Durango, CO to launch a The National Park Mystery Series and with Melanie Bishop of Carmel, CA and Prescott, AZ on the young adult Tate McCoy Series.  Both will have background environmental themes and will tell stories that are attractive to a broader audience than literary fiction might be.

Sounds like fun to me.  -Mark Bailey, Co-Publisher

The Typographer

The typographer pores over serifs, contemplates apertures big and small, sheds tears of joy and frustration over lachrymal terminals, the unpredictability of pixels (which he’d rather not deal with at all—the days of ink and page drawing to a close). Diagrams sheet the walls, chart the axis of the stroke through the ages. No windows, only a large, blank swatch of parchment, thick and bone-hued, on which he occasionally rests his eyes. A thankless occupation, typography—and a tricky one. Readers must be drawn to the type and unaware of it. A page about bicycles, for instance, must seem to zip along, swift, cyclical—no spokes clouding the insides of Os, no pedals dragging the ends of Ps, no padded seats atop Ts. He dreams in sans serif: lightly, pleasantly. His nightmares are scrawled. He attends to kerning as if it were an Irish jig—with dignity, punctuated by appropriate amounts of glee as he adjusts the slight space between letters. Homeward-bound, he savors a sweet breeze across his face. His thoughts italicize.

We love our Anne.

Rachel Carson is often credited with waking up the environmental movement in the 1970′s with her book Silent Spring.  The  Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge manager Bob Barrett credits Terry Tempest William’s book Refuge with making the place what it is today.  President Clinton, saying “this little book made a difference,” held Testimony in his hands on the rim of the Grand Canyon as he declared the Escalante Staircase National Monument into being, a book created by Williams and Stephen Trimble.  Arches and Canyonlands National Parks owe a lot to Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire.  Thoreau inspired Muir and Leopold, who wrote books many of us love, which in turn spurred the foundations of the The Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society.  There are many such examples.  Books make a difference and there is much work for change that remains to be done.

A book of Paul Hawken’s I have also long enjoyed is his Growing a Business.  In it Hawken says that, “The purpose of business . . . is not to take risks but rather to get something done.”  It’s why we created Torrey House Press.  -Mark Bailey

Take, for example, the title The Straw Bale House, published by our admired competitor, Chelsea Green Publishing Company.  As Chelsea Green points out, if you search online for “straw bale house,” their book is going to show up prominently.  It is hard to do the same for a title in fiction.  Unless you know the author or the title or both, you will be long in the search before one of our fiction titles show up.  Chelsea Green has sold a lot of copies of their title, a quantity at this point that THP can only dream about.

We are enthusiastic about balancing out our mix of fiction and nonfiction.  The environmental movement can use all the boost it can get.  When my son started in the Environmental Studies program at Prescott College in 2006, I thought he was going to catch a big green wave in his career.  Climate change and environmental concerns were frequently on the cover of national and international magazines.  Republicans and Democrats alike voiced frequent concern for protection of the planet.  But by the elections of 2012, global warming and man-made climate change were never even mentioned in the presidential debates.  With the coming of the Great Recession and an active anti-science PR campaign by Big Oil and its lackeys, environmentalism has become a political nonstarter and in the economy of today my son is having a hard time finding a job in his field.  Meanwhile we have record heat waves, record Arctic polar cap ice melts, mega storms like Sandy and epic droughts in the West.  With 7 billion souls now on the planet and growing, humans are the major natural force of change on the planet.  Given our ability to exercise reason, Torrey House thinks we humans ought to put it to greater use regarding our impact on the environment.

Therefore we are calling for lively, controversial, leading edge manuscripts on topics like water catchment, public land use, environmental health, environmental economics, sustainable living, renewable energy, land use policy, the importance of wilderness, the trans-formative power of natural places, environmental building and landscape design, about how small is beautiful, the local food and business movement and other ideas of enlightened, sustainable living.  If you think you have something along these lines, check out our submissions guidelines and show us what you have.  And, please, tell a friend.

DH Lawrence, Nature Writer?

In 1999, at a gathering organized by The Orion Society, Barry Lopez read a poem by D.H. Lawrence.  After the reading Lopez paused for effect and then stated, “D.H. Lawrence, nature writer.”  Laughter ensued.  This episode is mentioned in an essay in the Winter 2012 edition of the journal, ISLE,  where author Bill Sherwonit wonders if he might be “The Last Nature Writer.”  Sherwonit mentions the reading as the first he heard of the dissatisfaction some writers and critics have with being labeled a “nature writer.” I’m not sure Sherwonit specifically wrote his essay for ISLE, but he cites their existence as part of the evidence that the niche, or genre, or whatever it is, is not so dead.  ISLE says about itself:

The existence of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment reflects the rapid growth of ecological literary criticism and environmental scholarship in related disciplines in the United States and around the world in recent years, which in turn reflects the steady increase in the production of environmental literature over the past several decades and the increased visibility of such writing in college classrooms.

ISLE is available by subscription only so I can’t point you directly to the essay, but I enjoyed the irony of having this new, splendid journal of literary nature writing in my hands while I read of its demise.  I related with what Sherwonit described as his journey of discovering a writing style he loved and wanted to be a part of, in his case as a writer, in my case as a publisher.  Like Sherwonit I have been smitten by the likes of writers such as Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, David James Duncan, Terry Tempest Williams, Gretel Ehrlich, Edward Hoagland,  Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, John McPhee, Gary Snyder, and E.O Wilson and now deceased writers like Ed Abbey and Wallace Stegnar.  One of my favorites, Stephen Trimble was among the first to put together a nature writing anthology called Words from the Land: Encounters with Natural History Writing, back in 1989.  An original, dog eared copy sits on my bookshelf next to me now.

Lopez was saying that he wanted to be considered a great literary artist like Lawrence, not a mere nature writer.  Critics, like those from Orion Magazine, agree that being pigeon holed as nature writing diminishes the writing and the writer.  Well, sure, labels always do that and we all recoil at being described as something which over simplifies us.  I notice, for instance, that I call what we are trying to publish at Torrey House as part of a “niche” and avoid the word “genre.”  Genre is for romance and mysteries, I think to myself, not the literary stuff we want put out there.  Surely nature writing has more heft and might and staying power.  We will see.

Spring Valley, Nevada

This fall we will publish Jana Richman’s next novel, The Ordinary Truth.  The backdrop theme of the novel is based on the real life tension between the urban and rural West as the Southern Nevada Water Authority, the water agency for Las Vegas, Henderson, and N. Las Vegas seeks to pump up to 200,000 acre-feet annually from eastern Nevada and western Utah and send it through 300 miles of pipeline to support the area’s rapid growth.  A cover article in Salt Lake’s City Weekly on the controversy caught Barbara Richardson’s attention.   Barb is another Torrey House author whose historical novel, Tributary, we will be publishing this coming September.  Barb, a committed environmentalist, had no idea the pipeline was the theme of Jana’s novel, but she was so alarmed about the water grab and particularly about the potential harm it will cause to the Goshute Tribe, she wrote a blog piece of her own about it.  You can take a look at Barb’s elegant, photo-rich blog entry here.

We always hope our authors will support each other and are even more delighted when it happens all by itself.  Thanks for all you do, guys.

I’ll talk more about the sales conference in my next post.  It was a success for us as we continue to learn the trade.  The business end of publishing has been much on my mind so as an aside when we returned to Salt Lake I sat down with a little book that had just arrived in the office, Testimony, compiled by Stephen Trimble and Terry Tempest Williams.  I wanted to touch base a little with the reason we are doing this publishing thing and read some of these essays.  I had heard that President Clinton held up a copy of Testimony as he stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon dedicating the new Grand Staircase -Escalante National Monument and said, “This little book made a difference.”  Published in 1996 it is a set of love stories about the land for Congress to read and consider as they pondered adding more Utah land to the National Wilderness Preservation System.  No new wilderness was created, but the Monument was.  Literature in action.

This morning one of my email alerts was titled “Torrey House Press.  Are you listening?” I clicked on the link and found a blog post by writer Libbie Hawker telling us:

I am officially courting you.  Yes, you, Torrey House Press.  I have a crush on you.  I want to go steady with you.  I want to writer-marry you.  You’re my publishing soul-mate.  You with your mandate to protect the West, my place, my home.  You with your mission to make people love the land I came from as much as I love it.

How very creative, Libbie.  You got my attention.  Libbie went on to say that Torrey House is “placed and poised to make Western regional literature A Thing, in the sense that Southern lit is A Thing, respected, revered, sought after.”  I like that, of course, a lot.  It is a nice aspiration to try to build A Thing and help create a love and appreciation for the land.  You can see Libbie’s post here.  Thanks for the writerly love letter, Libbie.

In March Kirsten and I flew out to Minneapolis to meet with our new distributor, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution.  We landed smack into the country’s crazy spring weather.  The lake behind our friends’ home there was covered in ice on Saturday when we arrived.  By Sunday the 80 degree wind had cleared the ice and my host and I took an inaugural swim.

Still feeling invigorated, we met with the Consortium folks all day the following Tuesday to meet the staff and get oriented.  We came back to Utah with thick binders of information and feeling the need to put more energy into marketing and publicity.  We turned hopefully to our intern, Anne Terashima, with whom we have been very impressed, to see if she wanted to join us as an employee when she graduates from Westminster College this May.  Anne cheerfully agreed and we look forward to getting started with Anne in just a few weeks.

Next we are off to New York for Consortium’s sales conference there to give a brief pitch to the sales reps about our upcoming four titles for the fall season and acquaint them with our existing catalog.  Serendipitously, I will be able to catch my daughter, Kristen Bailey, acting in her company’s play there, Sophie’s Horns.

In the meanwhile we are pleased to learn that The Scholar of Moab has won The Association of Mormon Letters 2011 Novel of the Year award.  Last year’s winner was Brady Udall for novel The Lonely Polygamist.  Congratulations to author Steven L. Peck.  In addition, Renee Thompson’s The Plume Hunter won the Eric Hoffer da Vinci Eye award for superior cover art. Congratulations to Jeffrey Fuller, our book designer and Greg Downing, photographer.

I have written elsewhere on this site about “regulatory capture” and the resulting “Tragedy of the Commons.”  Capture is the idea that the hen house is run by foxes.  In that story if the foxes have their way there won’t be many hens or eggs left for anybody else.  The National Forest and BLM land is largely managed by and for the benefit of a very few who are exploiting the public land for private gain via extractive, damaging uses.

The land, once damaged, is then “improved” by the regulatory agencies at taxpayer expense in attempts to provide for more extraction.  In the end, the land is managed at the expense of many for the dubious benefit of a few.  For instance, even when severely degraded grazing allotments are brought to the attention of regulators—often by threat of litigation by environmental organizations—the BLM or the Forest Service spends hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time on “improvements” such as fencing or water projects, or “treatments” such as mechanical removal of the poorly performing plantlife, rather than telling the ranchers involved they can’t graze as much.  The public foots the bill while the livestock that caused the damage to the lands keep munching and crunching.  Never mind that the ranchers involved might very well be more than happy to take a just a portion of the money spent on “improvements” and “treatments”  to take their cows away and let the land “improve” all by itself – which it does in a hurry if left alone.  But that sensible buyout option is not on the table, and if it were we would all start hearing a great howling about the end of a “way of life.”

If the public knew about the “way of life” gambit they would not put up with it for long.  The way-of-life thing is a myth-of-the-cowboy that doesn’t stand up to any kind of objective scrutiny.  The way-of-life cowboy myth is no better for anybody than those cigarettes were for the Marlboro Man.  The same kind of effective lobbying that the tobacco industry used to deny that cigarettes cause cancer are used today by the special interest extractive groups.  The way-of-life objection actually keeps ranchers and their rural communities from much needed capital infusions while the range managers, who come from those communities, stick to outdated policies that do not serve the land, the public or their communities.  It all is pretty crazy but myths are hard to overcome.  Writers, if you know what I am talking about, send us some of your work.  -Mark Bailey