Cursory reflection indicates that home sales parties (see accompanying article) are rooted in a decades-old, perky mentality that doesn’t harbor the stamina to withstand our irony-laden life. It doesn’t cut it anymore to plaster a smile to your face in the name of making a buck while pretending that capitalism is pretty — or so you might think until you caught wind of the potential profits direct sales in the bookselling industry can offer. Life isn’t getting any easier for booksellers, but they’re not the only ones. “People like to talk about how terrible the book trade is,” Matthew Miller, the founder of a new Web site devoted to selling literary fiction directly to consumers, says. “But really, if you stand back for a minute, what’s going on in the book trade isn’t all that much different than what’s going on in a lot of different industries,” he says. “On the one hand, you’ve got the retailers getting bigger, bigger, and more aggressive and scrunching out the independents or the ‘economically less efficient’ types. On the other hand, you’ve got bigger, well, you can call them manufacturers, you can call them publishers, where you are getting bigger and bigger companies who … in my opinion they’re being run by a lot of accountants who are trying to react to trends and cash in on marketing trends rather than really just do what they’re there for, which is to find and publish good books.”
TobyPress.com is Miller’s new creation, up and running this month. Miller takes six new titles from a mix of debut and previously published authors every three months, which means that he publishes in four seasons, not two, and his books, all hardcover, don’t have jackets, so they resemble those old-fashioned grammar school primers. Miller’s books can be purchased at the Web site or via phone or fax orders but not through any bookstores or other bookselling Web sites.
I wanted to see how an author feels about not being able to conduct a conventional book tour (Toby Press books do not have bar codes, which forbids bookstore sales) and about a first work not being available at bookstores, so I spoke with Samantha Dunn, whose novel Failing Paris is one of the first six titles offered on TobyPress.com. Dunn readily acknowledges that Failing Paris has many qualities that make it difficult to sell; it’s not exactly experimental, but the narrative voice changes back and forth from first to second person. “It’s a small story, it takes place in a very short span of time,” Dunn says. “And I was lucky to get a very good New York agent, who told me, ‘Listen, this book is probably going to be very difficult [to sell], but I think the writing is very strong.'” Then he advised her that perhaps it might be wise to shelve Failing Paris and get to work on her second book. “So I was kind of prepared for that,” Dunn says. “I didn’t think that Simon & Schuster was going to get this book and just go, ‘Yes! Yes! The next Cold Mountain and the next Angela’s Ashes!’ you know? And I had received a lot of encouraging rejections, surprisingly, from mainstream publishers, but clearly this just isn’t a book that easily finds a home with the big publishers.” The agent then heard about Miller’s nascent Web site and called Dunn and told her about it. “I figured, ‘What the heck? Why not?’ It’s a grand experiment,” Dunn says.
This article appears in October 8 • 1999.