More Life

[susanstinson]

Spinsters Ink, which published my first two novels, is in the process of closing. This, sadly, is due in part to the serious illness of the current publisher, Sharon Silvas. It's also part of the larger trend of the disappearance of many feminist publishers, bookstores, and journals that made up much of the context in which I first became a published writer, and where the great majority of readers have found my work.

My most recent book was published by Firebrand, itself revived from closure by Karen Oosterhous after publishing some of the most powerful, influential and well-loved books in recent feminist literary history, books by Dorothy Allison, Shay Youngblood, Les Feinberg, Cheryl Clarke, Cherrie Moraga, Beth Brant, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Kitty Tsui, Jewelle Gomez, Judith Katz and Alison Bechdel among them. Oh, I read these books with such voraciousness and desire, steaming up my glasses with urgent language and hot, hot, hot aspirations. Many of these books are still available from Firebrand, mind you, and I'm proud to be published by this press, and to have my work on a list with such great history and such really fine new work.

One of the gifts that small, independent presses give their authors is that the books often stay in print for much longer than at larger houses. But now my first book, Fat Girl Dances with Rocks, is out of print. I only have seven copies (including two I just bought secondhand over the internet) left, so if I'll have to be very selective if I want to show the book to anyone. There are more copies of Martha Moody. There is always the possibility of new life for these books – new editions or new ways to distribute existing copies – but, for now, I just want to say that I love them enormously, and I love what I know about the life they've had in the world, and in the brains and dreams of individual readers, some of you dear to me on my friends list. I wish them more life.

Comments

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

Thanks a lot for looking that up -- it's what I suspected, and it's useful to know for sure (hey, look, Becca -- MIT.) Booklist -- I think it was Booklist, or it might have been Library Journal -- had a reviewer who really loved my first two books, but the magazine also has a requirement that they receive galleys three months before the publication date, and my current publisher doesn't do galleys, so there was no review. The same thing happened with Publisher's Weekly, which is a big gateway to being reviewed in the mainstream press.

It's true that it's possible that some copies have been ordered and are waiting to be catalogued, because some reviews that folks who order for libraries might have read, like one in the Women's Review of Books, have come in recently, but I think that most librarians simply haven't heard about it. And, yeah, if you have suggestions about that, I'd be very interested.

Hmm, but it's sinking in, what you're saying, that many librarians don't have the time to do labor-intensive selection work, and rely on automatic approval plans with major vendors. (That concentration of information stuff is so scary!) Still, Fat Girl Dances With Rocks didn't have a major distributor like that... (but it was an early and unusual use of Fat Girl in the title, so maybe it was easy to spot that way, and Spinsters had a good catalogue at that time...) *Anyway,* thanks a lot for taking the trouble to look that up for me, and all the best for your research and poetry library dreams -- charlottecooper says that there's a great poetry library in London -- and for reeling in one of those various dinky but also glorious literary prizes one day.

[arielblue.livejournal.com]

Another difference between the Spinsters books and this one might be the recent-ish history of Firebrand. I wouldn't be surprised if Spinsters is/was on some approval plans, and Firebrand may have been too, but when the word was that they were going under, a lot of libraries may have removed them and not put them back on. I'm gonna test this theory a bit by going over to WorldCat...

OK, I can't remember what year it was when Firebrand was in transition, but here is fiction published by Firebrand in 2000 and later, and how many libraries own each:

Bleeding out : a mystery / Clare, Baxter, 1959- (268)
And then they were nuns : a novel / Leonardi, Susan J., 1946- (40)
Dish it up, baby! : a novel / Helms, Kristie (8)
Venus of chalk : a novel / Stinson, Susan, 1960- (6)

And that's it. But, fiction they published in the 1980s and 1990s was collected by quite a few libraries, like The Fires of Bride (1988) which is in 186 libraries. So *something* changed over the years, and there are a lot of possible factors -- library budgets suck a lot more than they used to, fewer indie bookstores, harder to get mainstream reviews for small-press stuff, etc. -- but it also wouldn't surprise me if some of the vendors/distributors and/or relevant librarians don't know Firebrand is publishing (still/again). I'm gonna re-sort the full list by date and see what that looks like...

Okay, now I wish I knew what year things went nuts with Firebrand. There is definitely a sharp drop-off after 2000; a lot of stuff they put out in 2000 was still collected by quite a few libraries, but after that, phbt. (Although Post-Dykes to Watch Out For is only held by 86 libraries! And it came out in 2000. Okay, that's a crime.) One exception is The Price of Passion: An Erotic Journey by Jess Wells, held by only 23 libraries, but I can see where a lot of librarians would shy away from ordering something with a title like that.(Not that they *should*, but it's logical that it would be the case.)

Jeez, I'm a geek. Anyway, if this info/speculation would be useful to anyone at Firebrand, do feel free to pass it along; maybe there's something they could be doing differently.

Meanwhile, keep writing -- that's the important part. :)

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

Thanks again -- really interesting. And then they were nuns was the first new book published after Firebrand was reopened. The author is an academic, and so has access to those networks where the other books are less visible, and the book has been out longer and was nominated for a lammie, so all of that probably helped, but I'm remembering, too, that it had the actual cataloguing data in the front of the book, while in each of the later books, it says, "An application for cataloging has been filed with the Library of Congress," but the info itself isn't there. Is that a factor in whether or not librarians order the book, do you think? (It's something I flagged in the proofing process, but an author only has so much control...) Writers have more incentive to care about libraries (on this smallish scale, anyway) than publishers do, because it's not so much about sales as about readers and the longterm survival of the possibility of reading the book.

Thanks so much for all of your help. If you've got time to give me the numbers on Martha Moody, too, I'd be really interested. I'm about to get access to the last copies of that book, and am considering the best thing(s) to do with them, and this conversation makes me want to consider a library strategy, if the numbers are low, although that might not work so long after the publication date.