This just in (January 27) from Ilana DeBare of SFGate.com:
Bay Area small publishers like McSweeney's, Berrett-Koehler and Parallax
Press don't typically print melodramatic cliff-hangers.
But this month, they've been living one.
More than 130 independent publishers across the country were hurled into
financial crisis on Dec. 29 with the bankruptcy of the parent company of
Publishers Group West, the Berkeley firm that distributes books from much of the
small press world.
Among them are more than two dozen Bay Area publishers whose works range from
Dave Eggers' novels and Deepak Chopra's inspirational writings to business
books, Buddhist books and the "Here Comes the Guide" wedding planning book.
The bankruptcy hit these small presses at the worst possible time -- when
Publishers Group West was holding onto its sales revenues from the three months
before Christmas, its most profitable time of the year.
At the time of the bankruptcy filing, the company owed nearly $1 million to
Amber-Allen, a San Rafael publisher of personal growth books such as the
best-selling "The Four Agreements," by Don Miguel Ruiz. It owed $600,000 to
McSweeney's Books, the San Francisco press started by Eggers.
And tiny Parallax Press, a nonprofit Buddhist publisher in Berkeley with six
employees, was owed $150,000 of its total annual sales of $850,000.
"Revenues from the three most lucrative sales months of the year are not
available to us," said Travis Masch, Parallax's publisher. "This has a
tremendous financial impact on us."
The bankruptcy threatens the survival of many of these small presses. This
week, a potential white knight appeared in the form of Perseus Books Group, a
New York company that is offering to pay the book publishers 70 cents on every
dollar they are owed. But the bailout is far from certain.
The bankruptcy rocked a part of the literary world that even the most avid
readers don't pay much attention to -- the system that enables small presses to
get their wares onto the shelves of bookstores and, eventually, into the hands
of consumers.
Publishers Group West was a historic institution within the small press
world. Created in the late 1970s by a young Stanford graduate named Charlie
Winton, it actively promoted the work of its small press clients rather than
just warehousing and shipping their books.
It gave small publishers a collective marketing voice that could rival that
of a big corporation like Random House. Along the way, it helped create surprise
best-sellers like Charles Frazier's "Cold Mountain" and "50 Simple Things You
Can Do to Save the Earth."
Read the rest of the article—including a list of the affected titles and presses, by clicking here.
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