GC Beyond publishing, it seems to be a general
global trend that money and power of decision is
concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
DS You're right. This is not a problem of just
publishing at all.
Interview with a Publisher
Dennis Stovall
excerpt from The Writers' Block on KMUN
Dennis Stovall & his wife Linny have operated
Blue Heron Publishing in Portland for 13 years.
G in ni Callahan What are some assumptions that
purchasers and readers of books have about the
industry of books that may not be true?
Dennis Stovall Maybe now more than ever there
are some myths about the dissemination of information.
When we walk into the large super-stores, the initial
reaction 1 think is to believe that we have an amazing
menu from which to select, and there's never a thought
about how the selection process, that brings books into
the bookstores, affects what really is on the shelves
there, and what, more importantly, is left off the
shelves.
It looks like everything is there, but on the
contrary, we're suffering a tremendous loss of access for
new literature, particularly for new voices because of
the homogenization of culture that comes w ith the
lowest common denominator marketing of books in the
superstores.
GC I've heard it said that the publishing industry
has become essentially part of the entertainment
industry.
DS Yeah, it really did. Entertainment becomes a
key word, I think, in assessing the major publishing
houses now. In fact they're owned by Viacom and other
large entertainment places, Disney.
GC Publisher's Weekly is the magazine to read if
you're in the business of selling books. The magazine
tells of billion dollar companies and billion dollar
books, and it includes tricks on selling books, and
generally equates money with success. As a small
publisher, is this how you would define success?
DS Well, you certainly have to survive. The
d ifficulty for small publishers is actually just survival.
Publishing in general is not a business that pays
anybody well, certainly not as well as one would be
paid for comparable w ork in any other industry. On the
level of small press, though, the success is generally
driven by personal motivations-an interest in
literature and what one can contribute to culture, as
well as making a living.
The problem, though, and 1 think you've hit on it
here when you talk about the money side of things, is
that books and culture have become commodities.
GC Do you think the free exchange of ideas on the
internet balances that out?
DS Well, I think it's one of the opportunities for
publishing. It's another, at least at this point, mode of
really democratic access to an audience. Any one of us
can become a publisher on the web.
GC What does it mean that a handful of
corporations own much of the media and that they
control control ideas transmitted through TV,
newspaper, books, ra d io.. . what does it mean for the
people?
DS We hold freedom of press dear, but freedom of
press is sort of meaningless if the press can't get what it
publishes to its readers. The avenues of access to
readership are being controlled by fewer and fewer
corporate entities, whether it's the large publishers,
the large booksellers, or the large media conglomerates
who decide what entertainment should be. Each of
those in its own way narrows things for all of us.
GC As long as we have access to a computer, which
raises another. . .
DS That's right.
GC Historically, back before printing presses,
books were the privilege of the elite. Then came the
printing press. And then came American democracy
which is based on an educated electorate
DS and free libraries.
GC Books are absolutely integral to that. So in
light of what we've been discussing, books and
democracy, how in this going to pan out?
DS How it pans out is pretty hard to predict. In
the short run, there's a constriction of culture, and that
means the experimenters are putting their books in the
bottom drawers of their dressers and leaving them
there because there's not a market for them.
You made some really good points about the
democratization of literacy, I think when you talked
about the fundamental role of books in American culture
and that's always been part of the vitality of
American publishing, that we have mass literacy. It's
really quite recent that that's the case, and it really
went against that priesthood of intellectual control.
Now', it's not clear that we're creating a new
priesthood by circumscribing the marketplace and the
access for small presses. This is no longer a priesthood
which wants to say a certain thing, but it's a
priesthood that wants to make money, so it w ill say
whatever makes money, publish whatever makes
money.
It can't be healthy for a culture to be deformed in
that w'ay.
GC So it's in a way censorship of the marketplace,
or by the marketplace.
DS Yeah, but not in a conspiratorial way, but by
allowing the marketplace to decide, that is by
allowing only profit margins to determine whether a
book or a cultural commodity is worth keeping in place.
As long as that's simply bottom-line driven, the losers
w ill be anything that is marginal, which has a smaller
audience, or is controversial in any way.
The choices are made on the level of acquisition
among the publishers. This w ill sell better than that,
and the criteria is no longer the value of the thing as a
cultural artifact or as an educational tool, but only as a
profit maker.
GC When we lose those marginal writers, in this
case, what does society lose?
DS I think the center of a culture is defined by
what is going on on its periphery. If the edges shrink
in, and the circle becomes smaller, there's simply less
interchange going on. There are not the m ultiplicity of
voices and ideas that make the stew richer at its
center. We may still have a stew, but it has fewer
things in it, fewer things that are nourishing.
GC There is another way to finance literature, and
that's through funding, which is being reduced.
DS There are people who w ill argue that books
ought to survive in the marketplace or not survive at
all. The problem is that there are lots of things done on
the edges of a culture which can't support themselves in
the marketplace, but without which we're all poorer.
Even if they only goad us into reacting, make us angry,
they at least do something. There are fewer
possibilities for those sorts of books w hen subsidies are
denied, or when the subsidies are granted only after
censorship of ideas.
The small amount that was ever available through
the granting institutions public and private has now
been reduced incredibly. It really was very little. By
comparison with every other western modern
democracy, we are the most backward. We give the
least to support culture of any kind. In fact, we almost
make a principled stand to say culture is not worth
something unless it is a commodity.
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GC In your opinion, what is the value of books,
aside from money?
DS Books are a number of things. They are cultural
conveyances. They are part of our collective memory,
whether it's culture or politics, entertainment,
education, they transmit from one to another, from one
generation to another, from one mind to another. They
give us windows onto our own lives, onto our own culture,
onto the cultures of other people, that no other medium
does in the same way.
It goes along w ith what you also said about the
entertainment industry and big publishing.
So as long as culture is a commodity, and I think
this endemic to American consciousness, money is the
way to keep score.
Northwest Writer Craig Lesley
Wed July 23 lpm on KMUN Astoria
91.9FM: Interview on the W riters’ Block
Sat July 26 7:30pm at the Pine Grove
Community Center in Manzanita: Onion
The Writers' Block is produced by Ginni Callahan
and airs Wednesdays at lpm on KMUN 91.9FM
Peak Reading sponsored by the Neahkahnie Institute
Free. (503)368-7878
Wed July 30 12 noon at PSU Smith Memorial
Center, Rm 338: Lecture by John Davies “ In
Homage to Craig Lesley: A British View o f an
Oregon W riter” Free. (503)725-8500
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