Love Letters

Posted on May 10, 2012 by

Kirsten and I spent the weekend in New York City to attend our distributor’s (Consortium) fall season sales conference.  New York has always worn a little rough on me and this trip was the usual.  Friday evening we were working our way over to St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery on 10th Street and 2nd Avenue to see my daughter, Kristen, play the lead in Sophie Gets the Horns.  It was serendipity that Kristen was in New York from Philadelphia at the same time we needed to be in town and it made our jaunt that night a little easier on the nerves.  As we walked we noticed a crowd of folks, many with cameras, on what turned out to be the new High Line walkway, all peering down the street to the east and I wondered out loud what everybody was looking at.  We grabbed a cab, turned east, and there plunk dead center of the wide street, hanging between the canyon wall of buildings, the perigee moon, the largest in 20 years, was rising.  I felt rooted again, back on the planet earth I know, happy and comfortable for the first time since showing up in town.  And Kristen was fabulous, of course.

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.

 

Posted in Conservation, Literature and Philosophy, Publishing, THP Blog | 3 Comments

Preparing for our fall publishing season with new distributor

Posted on April 25, 2012 by

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.

 

Posted in Publishing, THP Blog | Leave a comment

Way of Life

Posted on March 7, 2012 by

The more I learn about the way public lands are being managed in the West the more I realize how the public is in the dark about it.  I just finished revising the language on our Submission Guidelines page and it has me thinking we are on the right track to publish work that helps improve the appreciation for and understanding of the cultural and environmental issues of the beautiful American West.

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

Posted in Conservation, Environment, Literature and Philosophy, Public land management, THP Blog | 5 Comments

Doors Are Open Again to Unsolicited Manuscripts

Posted on February 7, 2012 by

Kirsten and I have been delightfully busy.  Particularly Kirsten.  Last December when we were in Moab for the debut reading of The Scholar of Moab with Steve Peck at Back of Beyond Books, Mary O’Brien of the Grand Canyon Trust sat down next to Kirsten and asked her, “How do you like your job?”  Well, Kirsten loved her job with the state health department using her newly minted Masters of Public Health degree.  About the only job either of us could conceive that she might like more (her love of being partner and editor at THP is a given) would be working for Mary — and Mary was offering.  We mulled it over, Kirsten took a deep breath and decided to make the switch.

Then, in mid January Consortium Book Sales and Distribution said yes, they would like to pick us up and offer us full distribution.  The only hitch was it was very late in their season to get titles ready for fall.  The result was that Kirsten suddenly had three very demanding jobs.  As I post this blog, she has made it over the hump, smiling as she always does, is down to only two terrific jobs and we are ready to open our doors back up to unsolicited manuscripts.

If you have looked our website over and think you have work we would be interested in, let us know.  You can get started on the Unsolicited Manuscripts page.

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New Strategy

Posted on January 23, 2012 by

We are very pleased to announce that Torrey House Press is joining ranks with Minnesota based  Consortium Books Sales and Distribution in order to gain a greater distribution of our titles.  This change marks the end of a one year experiment in an alternative approach to book publishing that met with mixed success.

We published our first three titles in a manner known as print on demand (POD).  In the usual way we made contracts with our authors, developed and edited manuscripts with them and had the book interior and covers laid out and designed.  However, when it came to printing, we uploaded electronic covers and interiors to Lightning Source, a subsidiary of Ingram Group in Tennessee.  Books were printed individually when they were ordered instead of being printed in offset print runs and stored in a warehouse.  Lightning Source is both printer and distributor and through them we were able to make our books available to independent bookstores as well as online at places like Barnes and Noble and Amazon.  At Amazon, for instance, someone in their Prime program could order a book that had not yet been printed on Monday and receive it on Wednesday.  Modern day amazing.  It was all good except for one thing: it wasn’t enough to get books into the hands of more than a few hundred readers.

It turns out that books need to be hand sold.  It’s not enough to have social media set up, a web site, a mailing list, online listings, a few good reviews and word of mouth.  You might think that would be enough, and we were hoping.  But books need more of a nudge than that, particularly literary fiction and nonfiction.  Getting our handsome books in print the way we did established us as serious and got Torrey House to the position where a full service distributor like Consortium would take us on.  By this fall, Consortium will act as our much larger representative to the book trade—including bookstores, chains, wholesalers, libraries and specialty markets, providing sales and distribution through their in-house and independent representatives.  It’s a much broader reach than we could make alone.

For Torrey House this means stepping up and forward toward convention.  We will now be doing the usual offset print runs, perhaps in both hard cover and trade paperback, storing them in a warehouse and having them broadly distributed in the United States and Canada.  And hoping they sell.  Conventional publishers are struggling today, as everyone knows.  By nurturing our passion and keeping our overhead low we suspect that, with Consortium’s help, we can make this thing work.  Wish us luck.

Posted in Publishing, THP Blog | 4 Comments

Erica Olsen

Posted on January 19, 2012 by

Where do you call home if you are of Korean-Swedish-Norwegian heritage and were born in Hollywood?  In spite of her claim to not have a home town, Erica Olsen’s writing indicates to me that she has made her home on the Colorado Plateau.  She tells us that her writing influences include Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote about colonial America from the perspective of the mid-nineteenth century in his “twice-told tales,” and Isaac Babel, for the violence and beauty of the stories in Red Cavalry.  But it seems to me the stories in her collection are shaped most strongly by the landscape and past of the American West.  That and her obviously keen intelligence. We agree, Erica, put all that together and your stories offer the reader clarity of language, emotional and aesthetic complexity, and no easy answers.   They are Westerns.

We are more than delighted to have Erica join the growing family of THP authors with her collection of short stories we think we will call Recapture.  We are shooting for a fall 2012 publishing date.  See more about Erica and about Recapture on our Upcoming Titles link here.  Welcome Erica!

Posted in Environment, Publishing | 1 Comment

Blogs and Manuscripts

Posted on January 13, 2012 by

Reading is Sexy

It’s a new year and I want to get plugged into the THP blog thing again.  Over the next few weeks I’ll announce when we will open to unsolicited manuscripts again, what we will be looking for, and how to submit them.  I’ll also get caught up with a new job that Kirsten has that fits in tremendously with her job as editor at Torrey House Press.  Her job has do do with public land management which will give us a chance to pontificate about the grass on the mountains and water in the streams.  I’ve been reading some good literature on the subject including DeVoto, Galvin, Momaday, Duncan and Eisenberg and I’ll blog my thoughts on their aspects of environmental literature.  Good new year to you and keep reading.

Posted in Environment, Grazing, Literature and Philosophy, Public land management, Publishing | 3 Comments