Howard University Press passes baton to Black Classic Press

Congratulations to Howard University Press and Black Classic Press for forging this historic transaction that preserves the legacy of a distinguished university press and extends the the reach of a venerable Black publisher.  

Black Classic Press Acquires Howard University Press backlist; Plans New Editions 

By Calvin Reid (Publishers Weekly)

May 24, 2011

After 39 years of distinguished scholarly publishing focused on African-American life and history around the world, the Howard University Press is closing its doors. The university has reached an agreement with Baltimore-based Black Classic Press, an African-American independent press and print-on-demand vendor, to acquire a selection of the press’s backlist of more than 175 scholarly titles with plans to reissue most of them in new editions under BCP’s new line of Howard University Classic Editions.

Black Classic Press

W. Paul Coates, president of Black Classic Press, is a former Howard University librarian and a former street book vendor who began his publishing career selling books on the streets in front of Cramton Auditorium on the Howard campus. “It’s humbling to have the opportunity to extend the awesome legacy of the books created by Howard University Press because, for decades, Howard was the ‘gold standard’ that advanced Black publishing beyond the realms of any other press,” Coates said.

Howard University provost and chief academic officer Dr. James H. Wyche, said the closing of the press is “related partly to the significant changes that have transformed the publishing business,” and said, “after nearly four decades of unparalleled service to the scholarly publishing field, we have made a difficult decision.” But he also said, “This is a win-win proposition for Howard, HUP, Black Classic, and the many scholars, faculty, and students around the world who have benefited from the insightful and much-needed scholarship published by Howard’s scholarly press over the years.”

In a phone interview with Coates he outlined big plans for Howard University Classic Editions and said he plans to “immediately incorporate the titles into Black Classic Press’s digital database.” BCP will acquire about 84 of HUP's 175 backlist titles. John Hopkins University Press will continue to distribute HUP Classic Editions and the press will begin rejacketing about 6 titles a month in preparation for uploading them into the Black Classic Press’s POD database for reprinting. BCP is short-run and print-on-demand publishing house that specializes in reprinting classic works of African-American literature and keeping them in print. Coates said he expected to upload “the best selling titles first. We’ll eliminate on-hand titles through sales and remaindering.”

Founded in 1972 under the director of Charles Harris, at the time a former editor at Random House, the Howard University Press published about 12 titles annually during its best years. Among the press’s best known and best selling titles are Walter Rodney’s 1981 How Europe Underdeveloped Africa; and Dr. Joseph Harris’s 1993 seminal work, Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora.

HUP Press also sponsored the HUP Book Publishing Institute, an annual summer workshop that specialized in training African Americans, other minorities and women for careers in magazine and book publishing. Coates plans to revive the work of the publishing institute through an intern program at Black Classic Press.

“There will be an opportunity for Howard University students to intern at BCP to provide experience in print and an increasingly digital world. Students can grow as we grow in this sector,” Coates said. Coates also intends to extend the HUP’s publishing legacy by continuing to publish scholarly works by Howard’s and other faculty, particularly in the field of black/African studies as well as works on Africa and on African diasporan life in Latin America, the Carribean and elsewhere. “The acquisition will strengthen the BCP list in those areas and make BCP visible to everyone as a place to submit manuscripts,” he said.

Noting a long association with Howard University that dates to the 1970s, Coates said his acquisition of the list is the culmination of a dream to become a publisher that began on the campus of Howard University when he used to go to Founder’s Library to warm up on cold days when he was a street book vendor. “My whole idea to be a publisher began at Founder’s Library,” he said, “that’s where the idea that I would develop a press and be a publisher began. This is a unique opportunity. HUP is the only black academic press to turn its titles over to an independent black publisher and we will work to maintain an important black legacy. “

See the article and comments at: http://bit.ly/j2CAGX

University Presses partnering for survival

The plight and survival plans of university presses was recently reviewed in an article on The Chronicle of Higher Education website.

March 7, 2011

University Presses Are Urged to Work Together to Survive

By Jennifer Howard
Operating in this digitally powered era of "information hyperabundance," university presses still get most of their sales revenue from print sales. But they're also putting more and more energy into trying electronic, open-access, and nontraditional publishing—and are likely to be experimenting for a very long time. So says a new report made public today by the Association of American University Presses.

Read the full article at: http://chronicle.com/article/University-Presses-Are-Urged/126633/

Anthologies

With some regularity this year I will focus on anthologies as a genre. I have always found that there is much to be learned from an anthology because the editors (and/or writers of the introductions, prefaces, forewords) usually take precious care in explaining their purpose in assembling the anthology, whether they are charting new ground, reacting to another literary work, representing the work of a historical or literary era, genre or neglected area of study. I'll begin the new year looking at the recent publication of The Anthology of Rap (Yale UP, 20100, edited by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois.

Seg-book-gation

Check this recent article in the DC Examiner by Wendy Coakley-Thompson highlighting the ongoing discussion about how mainstream publishers market books by and about Black people.

Seg-book-gation - with a new twist
By Wendy Coakely-Thompson
DC Publishing Industry Examiner

December 31, 2010

African American authors have long complained about the disparity between them and their White counterparts. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the works of authors of color in general and of African American authors in particular are remunerated differently (i.e., through advance differentials), and marketed differently, and positioned and sold differently than those of White authors. Authors like Martha Southgate
(The Fall of Rome; Third Girl from the Left) have lamented this industry trend, which African American authors have called seg-book-gation.

Lest one be tempted to think seg-book-gation is some paranoid fantasy of overwrought African American authors with hyperactive imaginations, the Wall Street Journal, one of the nation’s most mainstream organs, explored race-based publishing practices. In a piece from 2006, Jeffrey Trachtenberg, the WSJ reporter who covers the publishing industry, addressed this disparity in a piece called Why book industry sees the world split still by race. At the time, the most glaring manifestation of seg-book-gation was the African American section in chain bookstores. Briefly, Trachtenberg pointed out that, as African Americans were only a small percentage of the population, African American authors would be dueling for the same targeted audience, and, as a result, had less of a chance of achieving widespread success. Moreover, Whites were less likely to patronize a section of the bookstore segregated by race. Some African American authors have tried to counter this aspect of seg-book-gation with humor. Carleen Brice (Children of the Waters; Orange Mint and Honey) writes the blog White Readers Meet Black Authors, her “sometimes serious, sometimes light-hearted plea for EVERYBODY to give a black writer a try.” She bills her blog as the White reader’s "official invitation into the African American section of the bookstore!” Humor would be valuable in confronting seg-book-gation’s most recent incarnation.

Enter White authors Kathryn Stockett and Sue Monk Kidd. African American author Bernice L. McFadden discusses their impact at length in her Washington Post opinion piece Black writers in a ghetto of the publishing industry’s making. It starts this way:

Kathryn Stockett's novel "The Help," published by a Penguin Books imprint, sold 1 million books within a year of publication. Her novel has gained accolades and awards, including the prestigious South African Boeke Prize. "The Help" is being adapted for the screen; at the helm of production is the Academy Award-winning director and producer Steven Spielberg. Sue Monk Kidd's best-selling novel "The Secret Life of Bees," also published by Penguin Books, is another story set in the South with African American characters. Kidd's novel garnered similar fame, fortune and recognition... Stockett's and Kidd's novels tackle racism and celebrate the power of friendship and acceptance. Both novels were given beautiful covers that did not reveal the race of the characters. Both books were marketed to black and white audiences.

The difference between them and McFadden is that, though McFadden’s novel Sugar, like The Help and The Secret Life of Bees, is set in the segregated South and explores similar themes, Sugar was marketed exclusively to an African American audience – that same overfished pond of African American readers. Though Stockett and Kidd are not the first White authors to write about African American characters, they, through the access White authors are granted, appear to be positioned as better than the real thing. The slippery slope of this trend would be that African American authors would be entirely Photoshopped out of their own experiences, replaced a more palatable Caucasian facsimile or by other essentialist notions of those experiences. McFadden, in her blog Naki, discusses how her latest novel, Glorious, remained relegated to the Black Expressions book club, while Stockett’s The Help is accessible in Black Expressions and in other mainstream book clubs.

But what do the staggering successes of Stockett and Monk Kidd mean to that old chestnut that Whites would not read fiction about African Americans? Who better to ask than Millenia Black…?

Link to article: http://www.examiner.com/publishing-industry-in-washington-dc/seg-book-gation-with-a-new-twist

Schomburg Center in Harlem Acquires Maya Angelou Archive

Maya Angelou’s paper trail includes a rambling, typewritten letter from James Baldwin, dated Nov. 20, 1970, addressed to “Dear, dear Sister” discussing everything from his new book to his feelings about death.

And one from Malcolm X, written on Jan. 15, 1965, assuring her, “You can communicate because you have plenty of (soul) and you always keep your feet firmly rooted on the ground.”

And a draft of her poem “On the Pulse of Morning,” which she recited at the 1993 inauguration of President Bill Clinton, showing Ms. Angelou’s changing the first line from “Rocks and Rivers and Trees” to the final, stark version: “A Rock, A River, A Tree.”

All of these things and more — a total of 343 boxes containing her personal papers and documents — have been acquired by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The trove has notes for Ms. Angelou’s autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”; a 1982 telegram from Coretta Scott King asking her to join a celebration at the King Center; fan mail; and personal and professional correspondence with Gordon Parks, Chester Himes, Abbey Lincoln and her longtime editor, Robert Loomis.


Read the full article by Felicia L. Lee printed in the New York Times on Monday, October 26, 2010

E-books...what is your experience publishing an e-book?

Pete Hamill, Patriarch of Print, Goes Direct to Digital
New York Times
By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: August 11, 2010

It makes perfect sense that Pete Hamill, 75 years old, chronicler of vintage New York City and newspaper tabloids and boozy Greenwich Village literary haunts, prefers print books to electronic.

Pete Hamill’s book about immigration will skip print and come out only as an e-book.
Far more surprising is this: His next book will skip print altogether and be published only as an e-book.

“They Are Us,” a book about immigration in the United States, is tentatively scheduled for release in the fall by Little, Brown & Company, its first straight-to-e-book venture.

And yet Mr. Hamill, on the verge of becoming a digital publishing pioneer, admitted that he has never read an e-book.

“It’s all personal taste,” he said in an interview. “For me reading a book is what I like doing, curled up in a corner in a comfortable chair. But I don’t have any moral superiority. I don’t care, as long as people are reading.”

There are not many New York writers who have lived more exclusively, and more prominently, in print. Mr. Hamill has been a columnist for The Village Voice; a reporter for The New York Post, The Daily News and New York Newsday; an intrepid foreign correspondent covering Vietnam, Northern Ireland and Lebanon; and the editor of The News and The Post.

In between all the newspapering, Mr. Hamill has written 8 nonfiction books (“They Are Us” will be his ninth) and 10 novels. (The 11th, “Tabloid City,” will come out in the spring.) There were also two books of short stories, photography books for which he supplied the text and three books he edited for Library of America.

For years he has been gathering material for a book on immigration but was unsure when it would come together, or what it would look like. “I had a passion to do something about the immigration mess, for complicated reasons,” said Mr. Hamill, who has lived in Mexico and is the son of immigrants from Ireland. “It drives me nuts, and I want to write about it.”

As the immigration debate heated up this year, so did Mr. Hamill’s desire to get his thoughts down in a book. He is just finishing the reporting (a recent morning was spent covering a pro-immigration protest on the Brooklyn Bridge) and beginning to write so he can meet his Sept. 16 deadline. The book will be on the short side, about 40,000 or 50,000 words — not that length matters as much in digital form.

The idea for an e-book was first floated by Michael Pietsch, the publisher of Little, Brown, part of the Hachette Book Group, who read the proposal for a book about immigration that Mr. Hamill had sent him. Mr. Pietsch was keen to try publishing a book only in electronic form.

“It just occurred to me — we’re talking constantly about e-books and what we can do to publish lively books in that way,” Mr. Pietsch said. “And it hit me, this is a book we can take straight to e-book. It just felt like an e-book.”

One of the reasons was the timing. Mr. Hamill wanted to write a book that dealt largely with the politics of immigration, and with the midterm elections coming up in November, it hardly made sense to abide by a traditional, slower publishing schedule. Putting the book out in digital form saved at least six to eight weeks for typesetting, printing and distribution, not to mention the cost of paper. With any luck, the book could be out before the midterms, so that it could influence the debate, not follow it.

Mr. Pietsch threw the idea out to Mr. Hamill. “He said, ‘Let me come in and see an e-book,’ ” Mr. Pietsch said, chuckling. “God love him, Pete said yes before he even saw a device.”

When Mr. Hamill arrived at Little, Brown, Mr. Pietsch spread out an assortment of electronics — iPad, iPhone, Kindle and Sony Reader, all of which he carries with him every day — for Mr. Hamill to inspect.

Since then, Mr. Hamill said, he has been asking around for recommendations so that he can actually own an e-reader. He is leaning toward an iPad.

“They’re all strange objects,” he said. “But I have friends who swear by them. I have a friend who’s 86 and swears by them.”

Navigating the logistics of an e-book tour might be more complicated.

“Some things have occurred to me,” Mr. Hamill said. “Will there be a book signing?”

Comments on "Urban fiction boosting the book industry"

Some responses on Facebook to my previous blog, "Urban fiction boosting the book industry?" What do you think?

Posted by Melodye Micere Van Putten
>Definitely falling off the cliff... In the mainstream bookstores under "Black Authors", that is all you see... you have to search for classic, intellectual or truly notable authors. Aka, "ghetto lit", is not progress!

Posted by Threefifths Tes
>So would you call Books like C l a u d e B r o w n Manchild in the Promised Land.

http://aalbc.com/authors/claudebrown.htm

Or Piri Thomas book Down These Mean Streets.

>Posted by lisa@nowrisebooks No, Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land doesn't glorify thug life. His book is autobiography, non-fiction; thug literature, ghetto lit, refers to fiction--works of the imagination.

In Manchild, Brown describes the gangs and street life he actually experienced, portraying what violent and criminal activities he and his young cohorts engaged in because they were rebellious and/or lacked constructive direction from adults.

Brown dedicates his book to Eleanor Roosevelt because, as I recall, she was instrumental in establishing the reform school he was "sentenced" to as a juvenile delinquent. The perils of gang life, undirected youth, reform, redemption, the need for government and society to provide the resources to help youth live up to their potential, these are the overarching messages in Manchild. Ghetto lit -- the few I have read or read through -- doesn't point the way out of that life; it resigns itself to living within the gang and violent street life, perhaps only escaping in death.

Ironic you mention Manchild because I decided a few days ago to re-read it after about 35 years.

Urban fiction boosting the book industry?

I'll have more posts on my visit to the Harlem Book Fair last weekend, but I wanted to make this quick note about urban fiction, which was abundantly represented--or overrepresented--at HBF 2010.

This afternoon I sat in on a webinar that focused on the impact of independent publishers on the U.S. book market. Jamie Carter, a representative from the data group Publisher Alley (a division of the pre-eminent book wholesaler Baker & Taylor) talked about sales trends among books produced by independent publishers. One trend she noted was that sales were ranked high enough among urban fiction to make it a top-selling category among independent publishers on the Baker & Taylor list (for the period between Sept 2008 through June 2010.) Carter said the fact that urban fiction titles ranked highly on the Baker & Taylor list showed that it has potential in traditional venues.

Carter went on to say that she had heard anecdotally that urban fiction, also known as "thug literature," was popular, especially in the New York area, and that a lot of it is sold from the trunks of cars. Urban fiction is underserved by traditional publishers and represents an opportunity for market expansion, Carter said, to my dismay.

This news from Baker & Taylor adds to my disappointment with the abundant representation of urban fiction booksellers at the HBF, which I will blog about on a later post. I am still sorting my thoughts out about the enthusiasm I could feel by seeing so many Black writers and publishers entering the industry, on the one hand, versus the discomfort with the quality of the content and morality of the story lines of their books, on the other hand. Or am I just judging books by their covers? No, I have read a few of these books. I am struggling with my own extreme points of view as profound as, "judge not lest ye also be judged" versus "this has got to stop!" Leaning towards "this has got to stop." What do you think?