When we first came up with the idea of bringing some of our favorite, now hard to find, in many cases Out of Print, books back into available for readers by creating eBooks for them--that's who we started to contact, authors (or their agents) who had published books that we loved, had difficulty finding copies of, and that sort of thing. Some agreed pretty early on--they tend to have the covers that I'd like to see re-done some day soon as our original idea was to have a Series style, however it ended up being maybe too plain. Pinckney Benedict and his fantastic debut, Town Smokes, was an early title. The first three of Jonathan Baumbach's titles that we finished also have this cover style, perhaps fortunately for his other titles we've done, or are finishing now, that early process was not the most efficient and so not all of his books got done right away. Gina Frangello's My Sister's Continent was another early signee. George Singleton had one title we could do, These People Are Us, Michael Martone had three, as did Stephen Graham Jones.
Another thing that happened was my own personal discovery of authors I'd not previously been familiar with--Merrill Joan Gerber might have been the first in this category. She'd heard about the Series and inquired about our doing some of her books, and at the same time had submitted a new novel for consideration in our print line. It was fantastic and I discovered so was her back list. An author whose first works were published shortly after Joyce Carol Oates' first works, they actually had a working relationship at one point with MJG publishing a short story collection with Oates' Ontario Review Press. Gerber was writing about women's sexual desires in her fiction well before that became any type of normal. She captured New York in the 60's and California in later years and published 17 eBooks with Dzanc, short stories, novels, and non-fiction--all of it great and a pleasure to have "discovered." (side note--she also created all of her own covers).
William Goyen was another such author--Kyle Minor brought his work to my attention at a time happened to be working with another author at the agency Goyen's work was with. Reading his novels, his short stories and the one non-fiction book, both as a fan, and then again as a proofreader, was fascinating. Right around the same time I'd read something about Thomas Williams and bought the one eBook he had that was available and it was incredible (though the eBook itself was seriously flawed--typos in the triple figures, a book that had simply been converted and published with no apparent proofreading done at all). I picked up a couple of his other novels and they too were great. I tracked down his daughter and we've published the eBook for every other work that Williams published.
I also got to catch up on authors that maybe I knew of (Baumbach, Stephen Dixon) but had not read much of their work because Steve was such a big fan and pushed to get their work signed up. This also led to authors I was not familiar with at all such as Jay Neugeboren and Jay Parini--both fantastic writers.
Some of our working with specific agencies (and I must add in here--we'd been picking up a book or two here and there but it was a trip to NYC that Steve set up and Matt Bell went on with me where we spent two harried days zipping back and forth across the city hitting agency after agency--big, small, crazy big ((30 minutes on the dot and everybody but the two of us stood up to thank us for coming)), boutique and a couple of absolute legends, one of whom could have told us stories for days on end and we'd not have considered leaving the couch) and suddenly things started moving at a much better clip--authors like Percival Everett, and Joseph McElroy, and Ronald Sanders,
and Dawn Raffel, and Steve Stern, and Janet Kauffman started to pop up on our list. Eventually some others like Robert Coover and Carol Leavitt did as well.
Some books that didn't really get a fair shot found their way to having solid homes: Stephen Graham Jones' Seven Spanish Angels was the first of these--a book whose original planned publisher decided not to publish it at the last second; J. Robert Lennon's Happyland was another--a novel with a fairly well-known story about being dropped for possible legal issues even though the person that said possible legal issues might come from clearly said she would not be doing so. Jane Ciabattari's short story collection, Stealing the Fire, never really had proper distribution. A couple of other novels we decided to publish as original eBooks--another by Gerber, one by Greg Logsted that was one of our original print submissions that, at the time while we were only publishing a book or two a year hadn't quite made it for us, but one that we couldn't get out of our minds.
A few of my favorites of all-time: the aforementioned Town Smokes, Dean Paschal's By the Light of the Jukebox; Charles Johnson's The Sorceror's Apprentice have found their way into this series as have a couple of mini-books--taking a trio of B.J. Hollars' essays and creating a short eBook from them--another taking three very early TC Boyle stories that have never been published in any of his books and creating Rock & Roll Heaven.
Over the years it's been ridiculously exciting to find books from the past and dig into them and really be excited about them and then find out they're not available in eBook form, and in many cases not new in print any longer either, and to dig around and find that author or a relative to let them know how much we enjoyed it and do what we can to get a copy available. And while it's fantastic when we have one that sells some copies month in, month out--it's just as satisfying when a single copy sells after four or five months of no sales--it means there's another reader out there that will get the enjoyment we did when we read the book, when we had it converted and got to read it again as proofreaders. Knowing there might be another reader out there finding that first Gerber or Williams or Goyen or.... It's simply exciting when that happens.
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