EDITOR: ALANA WILCOX

Alana Wilcox is the Editorial Director of Coach House Books, an independent literary publisher of poetry, fiction, and select non-fiction. Passionate about the art and craft of publishing, she is also the co-founding editor of the uTOpia book series about Toronto and the author of the novel A Grammar of Endings. 

You manage a few different facets of Coach House Books, perhaps the best place to start is to get a better sense of your position, what do you do at Coach House? Or if it really varies from project to project, what was your role in Queen Solomon? And do you have a personal approach to art and literature more generally (for example, your opinion of the function or value of art in society)?

I’m the Editorial Director of Coach House Books, but as with many smaller presses, editing is just a small part of my job: I also handle the finances, staffing, planning, etc., as well as acquiring and editing our fiction list. I acquired Queen Solomon and edited it, and I also did the interior layout. I handle liaison with the cover designer, the proofreader, in-house marketing and publicity, and our US publicity and marketing people. 

This list of tasks is pretty much the same for all of the fiction list. With poetry and non-fiction titles, I have a say in the acquisitions, but I don’t take care of the editing directly, though I still do copyediting and sometimes layout.

Your question about the role of literature in society is an enormous one, and I could go on for days about it. It’s an interesting moment for literature: we read more and more (on Facebook, basically) but fewer and fewer books. We fetishize the idea of a book—everyone wants to have written and published one, for instance—but we don’t value the book itself; we’re willing to spend, say, $6 on a totally ephemeral latte but complain about $15 for a beautiful book you can keep forever that someone spent years writing. Publishing has to exist somewhere in this contradiction.

I think books have a multiple of purposes: some entertain, some challenge, but all ask you to exercise some kind of empathy or openness or imagination. It’s not like the screen arts, where everything is right there for you; reading a book means you have to provide the picture, or put the pieces together, or consider an opinion that might differ from yours. That sounds idealistic, but I do think it’s true.

As a publisher in this particular moment, it feels more important than ever to continue providing books, especially books that are unexpected, that push against the mainstream, that have as their intention not only financial gain but also a contribution to a cultural conversation—a reminder that books are powerful. Queen Solomon considers very difficult questions and provides no clear answers, and it does so in a way that is provocative, beautiful, and complex. 

This goes to your point about the “fetishization of the book,” where the ends seem to have forgotten about the means, the very important processes that are in place to bring about that end-product. I think in the almost 600 years since the invention of the printing press and Aldo Manuzio with his Aldine Press (the first publisher, as we know them today), literary publishing has developed a curatorial model, a way of finding, assessing, refining, and introducing into the public sphere voices that engage or illuminate something vital to that public. Now in the age of mass media and the internet, that curatorial model has been blown to pieces. And on one side, I had thought good, let the public be free to share thoughts to all. Let more voices into the conversation that would otherwise be shut out or ignored. But, of course, that isn’t what’s happened really and it couldn’t be. By nullifying curation, individual insights have been devalued. Facebook and other social media outlets have refused to take on the true role of publisher and instead settled for mob control (though I think this model was first established by television with their commercial/advertisement models and has just been exacerbated by the internet). In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman offers some useful insight to this point:

What is information? Or more precisely, what are information? What are its various forms? What conceptions of intelligence, wisdom and learning does each form insist upon? What conceptions does each form neglect or mock? What are the main psychic effects of each form? What is the kind of information that best facilitates thinking? Is there a moral bias to each information form? What does it mean to say that there is too much information? How would one know? What redefinitions of important cultural meanings do new sources, speeds, contexts and forms of information require? Does television, for example, give a new meaning to “piety,” to “patriotism,” to “privacy”? Does television give a new meaning to “judgment” or to “understanding”? How do different forms of information persuade? Is a newspaper’s “public” different from television’s “public”? How do different information forms dictate the type of content that is expressed?

So I guess my question is how do you as a publisher reframe the conversation? Is this on your mind when considering marketing strategy, publicity, and cover design? And I wonder if it is something that must be confronted collectively with other publishers (versus individually focusing solely on one’s list and the numerous factors that go into a single publication)?

That is the question, isn’t it? How DO we reframe the conversation? It’s always on my mind, but it’s also endlessly frustrating. As a smaller publisher, we have to work so hard to get attention for our books, to keep fighting the fight, that there’s not much time or space left for reimagining how publishing works. I’m frustrated, for example, that as an industry we decided it would be a good idea to give free books or ARCs to anyone interested in them (bloggers, potential reviewers, etc.) with the hopes that those people might spread the word. But now anyone remotely connected to the industry expects free books. We give away our ‘product’ to the very market that used to buy them. Now, I’d love to be able to give all our books away, but the fact remains that this is a business, and this development, where now no one expects to pay for anything—not just books, also newspapers, magazines, music, etc.—makes staying in business much more difficult.

My problem with this, aside from the business challenges it poses, is that it devalues what we make. People still place immense value in the IDEA of a book—which is why everyone wants to have published one—but they are less and less willing to pay money for it. The price of books has been relatively stagnant for decades. Movie tickets have gone up, but we fear that consumers won’t pay more than the equivalent of three lattes for a book, and so, despite the cost of paper increasing exponentially and large retailers taking a bigger and bigger cut, we have barely raised prices. And even then, people want them for free.

And it’s a vicious circle. As publishers have less and less cushion, we have less and less ability to take chances, either on books or on bold new strategies for keeping our industry viable. We’ve always been a self-effacing industry in many ways: we promote our books and authors and not ourselves, and so the public doesn’t understand or value what we do. We need to change that, if we want readers to be willing to support us.