Richest Juice in Poison-Flowers
By Nikki M. Pill
In this month’s “Trends in Publishing” article, Nikki M. Pill explores how their shrewd, common-sense philosophy has earned Night Shade Press one of the best reputations in today’s small press world.
Jason Williams and Jeremy Lassen look more like roadies for Motorhead’s latest tour than successful publishers; they’re both stocky and look a little dangerous. Jason has a long sandy ponytail and Voodoo tattoos; Jeremy has a shock of blond hair atop his mostly-shaven head and a lifetime supply of black clothing. Jason speaks in long, expansive paragraphs; Jeremy in short, concise ones. Both curse like sailors, and they’re blunt enough that you don’t see the razor wit coming until it’s already sliced past you three times. They’re also remarkably friendly, open, and intelligent.
What inspired to you start Night Shade Press?
JASON: I didn’t set out to start a publishing company. I had intended to start a bookstore, and then I realized that neither myself or any of the people I’d selected as partners knew anything about how to start or run one, but we talked about doing a little publishing thing. I thought it was pretty cool. I was a collector at the time, I was in my Cthulu mythos phase (thankfully that’s passed), and I knew these two guys who were working on a book about the Necronomicon. I thought it was pretty cool and I said, “You should self-publish it.” They were broke, and I’d gone straight from the military to a dot-com, so I had more money than I knew what to do with; I said I’d even pay for it. They said, “Why don’t you publish it?” Two weeks later, someone wanted to sell me an S.P. Somtow collection. Before I knew what I was doing, I had three books in the pipe. So it was kind of an accidental thing. I never really thought, “Oh, I want to be a publisher.” There was a brief period in about the sixth grade when I wanted to be a writer.
What happened?
JASON: I realized I have nothing to say. Technically, I can write just fine, I just don’t have anything to write about. I never wanted to direct a movie, I always wanted to produce. I certainly never wanted to be an actor. When you’re the publisher, you’re the power behind the throne. The author gets the attention, but you know how things work.
And as with most of us in the business, it’s a professional fanboy thing. I’m a terrible fan. I have nothing to say. “I like your books?” Duh, I bought it. I never talk to authors about their books. I see what other people do and say, “I can make money on that.” The money’s optional, actually, we don’t make much. I can use whatever skills I have, like talking on phone, to get books out so people can read them, and that’s pretty cool.
JEREMY: What inspired me to start my publishing company – I started doing one called Freak Press – I was doing a quarterly zine. That experience, combined with working in a science fiction specialty bookstore, lead to me thinking I should do genre books. In San Francisco, I was in midst of my first book, I met Jason. Shortly thereafter, we combined our forces.
JASON: He knew how to typset and do layout, which is black magic to me. I knew how to get books reviewed, get ISBNs, get wholesalers, so we thought, “Hm, let’s join forces.” Since I had three [books] and he had one, we decided to stick with the name Night Shade.
We have similar enough taste that we both like the same kind of stuff, but different enough tastes that I’ll buy projects he never thought of, and vice versa. I don’t have to worry he’ll buy stuff that isn’t appropriate for the company, I know it’ll be a Night Shade book.
What was your proudest moment with Night Shade? What was your most exciting experience with the press?
JEREMY: Hmmmm…. M. John Harrison.
Is that the book Neil Gaiman leaped across a table to grab from you?
JASON: (laughs) Yeah, the galleys? That’s the one.
JEREMY: When we approached M. John Harrison, his collection had never happened. He’d been out of print in the states for ten years, and mostly ignored. He’s probably the most important British author in past 25 years…. Enormously influential on two generations of writers from England, like China Mieville and Graham Joyce, the list goes on and on. We did his book and got a shitload of publicity. It made the New York Times summer reading list, best book of year on several lists, Publishers Weekly… and his editor at Bantam published Light, and said “It’s really great you did that collection, and were able to market it, because I could convince the marketing people that there is market for this big-brained science fiction writer who’s dark and twisted. Without you having blazed that trail, I wouldn’t have been able to do it.”
Light has been enormously successful, the British publisher reprinted his collection. We didn’t do all of it, we were in the right place at right time, but we contributed to resurgence of M. John Harrison. He gets to the heart of this convulsive beauty with such perfect writing, but takes us to such dark places.
JASON: No matter what we did, we kept being seen as a horror small press. That was originally idea but only for the first 15 minutes. In our minds, we did a lot of cross-genre list stuff, but from people who are predominantly horror writers. It’s not like I could get the projects then that I can get now. Harrison was kind of untouchable, he couldn’t sell. After that [Night Shade anthology], he sold. But the proudest moment around here changes from day to day. It’s kind of like the covers. Each new cover, as far as I’m concerned, best one we’ve ever done.
It’s kind of funny in that we are almost completely creatures of reputation. It’s not like we’re the greatest thing since sliced bread. We’re broke half the time, we don’t pay that well, it’s not like we’re mystically selling fifteen thousand each time… people like us, and people want to work with us. I think the major thing we’ve got going for us … people like the idea of the company. Not everything we try to do works. But at least, for the most part, we’ve got ideology.
And what is that ideology?
JASON: Getting out the kind of books we like and trying to promote them as best we can. Constantly evolving the company. Like next year, we’re doing a lot of trade paperbacks. We wanted to in the past but didn’t have the distribution. What can we do to better sell the books, better promote them, get better editing.
In the small press mentality, you see a lot of “New York is dumb, we’re going to change everything.” It’s hard to castigate New York when you drink with them, when you start to see why things done the way they’re done.
Like why they take books out of print. I understood the first time I received a five-figure tax bill! If it’s not selling, get rid of it, it’s taking up resources that could be used for next book. We’re allowed to do certain things New York isn’t – how we handle projects, how we budget. Our overhead compared to New York – we’re not paying for New York real estate, we have no employees, because of that kind of stuff, we can have much lower profit margins and do stuff that wouldn’t necessarily go over well in New York.
We work with authors who went through the New York grinder and didn’t sell well for whatever reason – not commercial enough, etc. Because of all that, we can jump in on those people and make long-term commitments. Like Liz Williams’s three-book contract. I knew that the first one [Snake Agents] wouldn’t make any money, and probably not the second, but the third, we’ll see a sales surge, and then people will want to buy books one and two. Give me an author who can turn out a book a year and I can work with that. A lot of stuff we do, we can do with economy of scale.
What is the hardest part of your job?
JEREMY: The ebbs and flows, the swings. One minute, we’re on top of word, woohoo, that’s great. The next minute, the world is ending. One month, everyone loves us, we won the World Fantasy Award. The next month, nobody knows us, we’re broke. So I don’t think it’s any one particular thing, it’s just publishing is gambling and you’ve got to be ready to deal with the losses as well as the winnings
JASON: My job particularly is traffic cop. That’s what I do every day. I make sure everything gets done and signed, follow up with so-and-so to make sure the cover copy is written and proofread, ask what’s the schedule, does anyone know the ISBN? That’s the hardest part because that’s the bulk of my job. I try and keep everything on track. We’ve got twenty-six books on track for next year and we’re late already. I spend the day on promotion. If we sell one thousand, how to we get to fifteen hundred. One we hit fifteen, how do we get twenty five? The hardest part of the job is the fact that there is nobody else to ask. I can’t pass it up to the boss.
What catches your eye when you’re reading manuscripts?
JEREMY: For me, because I read manuscripts on the go everywhere, I’m in line at the post office, in a hundred places doing a hundred things. It’s a rough environment, and that’s my filtering process. If you can suck me in so I don’t notice what’s going on around me, if I can get lost in the world that’s being made, that’s when I know that it’s worth it for me. There’s no particular style. There’s the eloquence of some, or short sharper simple prose, either way, it’s getting lost in that world. When people read the books, they’re on the bus or subway, they’re doing a million things. It’s got to suck them out of their day-to-day.
JASON: For the purposes of getting through a slush pile – if you hit any of my hot buttons, that’ll have a quick impact. If it rings bells in my mind that says Lucius Shepard, then I know I’ll like it. I don’t like alternate history, I don’t like time travel, I don’t like memory tricks. “Who did I used to be? Oh no, I’m a brain-wiped clone who used to be Ronald Reagan.” If I think it’s well done, I’ll send it to Jeremy, because I know I won’t like it. A novel about pirates – I’m going to look at it. I get horror out the ass because there’s us and there’s Leisure. I’ve got two hundred horror novels pending in my slush pile right now.
What’s a turn-off?
JEREMY: Manuscripts or cover letters? Sometimes I don’t make it to the manuscripts.
Horrible cliches. Particularly in the horror genre, a lot of manuscripts we receive are just so cliche-ridden, that even if it’s incredibly well written and engaging, a vampire novel – wow, it better be Dan Simmons. The best damn vampire novel ever written. Vampires are one step above furries. They might even be one step below them.
I was reading a manuscript where a protagonist was the writer was going through problems, this really great ghost novel, but a novel about a writer has been done so many times, that while it was done well it wasn’t about to raise above everything.
JASON: The first thing that gets 90% bounced is that they’re incompetently written. They’re written by someone who doesn’t know how to assemble sentences. Unfortunately, that’s most of what I see. I see a lot of the most hackneyed stories imaginable. I don’t like Southern Gothic Vampires stories; stop sending them! I don’t care about your character who discovers he’s Lucifer’s nephew. Everything that needed to be said about vampires has already been said.
Many writers hear dire warnings about genre-bending work. It’s hell to market, publishers can’t figure out how to sell it, etc. What is your key to making this work?
JEREMY: It’s kind of a two-prong thing, really. The really good stuff, if it’s really really good, and really marketable and classifiable, they go to the majors and we don’t get to look at it so we’re left with the shit that’s hard to market. Five years later it becomes a genre, and the majors figure out how to market it. So we’re blazing that trail and it’s becoming its own subcategory.
Why we can is that every book is treated individually, and marketed and promoted as such. That’s a luxury we can afford…We’re able to tailor things so we can effectively reach their audience. We see a lot of great novels but most are great novels that aren’t marketable, so the majors turned them down. And also other side, like with Tim Lebbon. We got this novel from him and we were like, “Holy shit, Tim, this is the most commercial thing we’ve ever gotten.” We’d already contracted and paid for it, but we said he could do better with Bantam, so we’d get the next one. Bantam knows how to sell fantasy.
Not that I turn away mainstream novel stuff, we just published our most marketable novel ever, with Snake Agents by Liz Williams. It’s entirely accessible, occult investigator kind of thing. It’s terribly marketable, and it got bounced from a few publishers before it landed in our laps and we were like, “MY GOD, YES,” and we got a three-book contract. Even that one, our most marketable book, is this weird fusion, part science ficion, part horror, part fantasy. I call it Jon Constantine meets Chow Yung Fat.
JASON: You’re looking at perspective, and you’re looking at scale. On one hand there’s Jeff Vandemere, who’s obviously fantastic. He’s got mushroom people, for God’s sake! The fact that he’s got a literary sensibility about it is even better. What I have a harder time selling is something that’s obviously mainstream, but it’s fantasy if you look at it the right way. It happens all the time.
The stuff that’s very obviously genre is a lot easier to sell. If you two authors no one knows, it’s easier to sell China Mieville than John Carroll. He didn’t sell for a long time.
They didn’t sell?
Absolutely right. Sell say, well as Jordan? No. The more literary it is, the harder it is to sell. More people read Lois McMaster Bujold than Gene Wolfe because Wolfe is complicated and hard to read, Bujold isn’t. M John Harrison’s writing isn’t enjoyable. Important, life-altering, sure. Enjoyable? No. The main character is a serial killer!
Once the ground’s been prepped, it’s a lot easier to say “something like that.” I simply don’t have to sell as many copies. There may only be ten thousand people who want to read it, but if I sell ten thousand, I’m delighted. Those numbers could get a New York editor fired. Breadth allows us to experiment.
The worst ones to sell is not fantasy mainstream lit cross-genre… but the horror-fantasy cross-genre stuff. Because we like literary horror. We like smart horror. But the horror people won’t read it; most of the current horror community isn’t a fan of smart. But on the flip side, fantasy people won’t read horror because horror is “awful.”
Have you read any wonderful books or stories lately?
JEREMY: Yes. Do I have to tell you what they are right now? (laughs) New Children of Company by Kage Baker. Totally on a whim, I picked up an anthology called San Francisco Noir, an anthology of noir stories set in San Francisco. Oh my GOD, it’s so good! . It’s a little outside my normal genre, but when a book makes me want to get up and publish mysteries, which is the most stupid thing I could do, it’s got to be good. It’s got great writers and captures the city well. I just finished Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s Arabesk series. His third book in that series is just coming out in the States and that just totally turned my crank, I loved that.
JASON: Jeffrey Ford’s new book The Girl in the Glass, I thought was excellent. I’m three quarters of the way through Tim Pratt’s first novel and it’s very good.
Even if you’re reading a book, it’s in the back of your mind – “I wonder if this person has any projects available, oh this is what Bantam does.” I find a lot of my leisure reading is graphic novels because I can read them quickly.
Do you have any predictions for trends in publishing in the next 2-5 years? This can be anything: types of stories, the medium in which they’re published, etc.
JEREMY: You’re gonna see the majors get continue to retrench, continue to get more and more conservative, taking fewer chances. During this time, you’re going to see some major shakeups and further consolidation among the majors. One of the big guys is going to get consumed before too long. But during this time of retrenchments you’re going to see some expansion in several companies like Pegasus and Avalon books. They’re both publishing companies who have taken in six to twelve imprints … the conglomerate model but decentralized – editors are driving things. They and other companies like them will expand into the spaces that the Random Houses and the Harper Collinses are going to leave. Right now, it’s a brutal bookselling economy. Nobody’s buying hardcovers unless its name that they know and love, so the market is getting tighter. You’re seeing midlist authors get dropped all over the place. I think there’s a lot of opportunity there for companies like Night Shade and Tachyon to fill in the space. When the economy and bookselling is better, I think there’s going to be some major shakeups in who’s important.
JASON: I think, unless the economy stabilizes, you’re going to see further retrenchment, editors being more conservative with projects. Less outside chances, and a lot more “I know this will sell.” I think you’re going to see advances continue to go down – they’ve gone down a lot. Ours have gone up but New York’s have gone down a lot. I think you’re going to see some more small presses raise up. I think some are going to die off. In order to maintain something like Night Shade, you have to be in all day every day. A hobbyist could never sustain this kind of scale, you have to pay attention all the time.
There’s a lot of great material out there that isn’t getting done. I’m still not able to do everything I want to do. Especially short story collections, because they don’t sell all that well. We find ourselves having to cut back a lot, we’re down to six or seven a year. We used to do twelve! When you can’t get novels, you do short story collections. If there are two books I like, but if one’s going to sell and one won’t, I’m always going to choose the one that’s going to sell. People are being a lot more careful
For trends in what people are reading – I haven’t got a clue. I think you’re going to continue seeing fantasy as kind, and a whole lot of first novels getting done. Because first novels are something everyone can do; for the most part, you can get them cheap. Throw it against the wall, see, if it works, great, if not, you’re not out much.
JEREMY: It reminds me of the late 20’s, early 30’s. Publishing was kind of moribund and presses like Random House were up and coming, and reshaping the industry. I think another revolutionary change in publishing is going to happen in the next three to seven years.
To see Night Shade’s entire line of books, you can visit their web site at http://www.nightshadebooks.com.
