MARKETING/PUBLISHER: MARTIN RIKER

Martin Riker is the author of Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return, published by Coffee House Press in October 2018. Lit Hub described the novel as “A lush, comic, and bighearted journey through the minds and experiences of American strangers.”

Formerly with Dalkey Archive, Riker and his wife Danielle Dutton founded and run the feminist press Dorothy, a publishing project. Both teach at Washington University in St. Louis.

There is this one line that stuck out to me in the Dorothy profile from the Los Angeles Review of Books: “At Dorothy, all the books live, all the time”—referencing a move away from the binary of backlist and frontlist titles. [For those who haven’t worked in bookstores or for publishers, frontlist titles refer to books published in the last three to six months and backlist just about everything else. And I should add, backlist titles often receive no promotional support from their publishers. All publicity and marketing plans are loaded into those first few months leading up to and after publication.]

One of the biggest challenges, I imagine, is finding new ways to talk about books that may have been around for a few years already, because a publisher can only reach out to their network of reviewers and media outlets so many times with the same talking points—that and finding inroads with new audiences, finding readers where they are. To that end, how has Dorothy been able to create a new approach to the marketing and sales of books both new and old?

First thing I’d say is that when we talk about how we aren’t frontlist oriented, that’s true and it isn’t. Aside from group ads and a few other marketing things (selling the books as a set, displays in bookstores), we do, of course, focus almost all of our marketing efforts each year on the two new titles. In fact it would be corrosive to the backlist not to, because, with a very few exceptions, how a book fares upon its debut into the world will determine the trajectory of how it continues to fare after the publishing industry stops talking about it. 

For us, seeing the backlist and frontlist as all one list is both philosophical and practical. Philosophically, it means that Dorothy, for us, is this ever-growing organism, ever-becoming, and all the parts matter. It means that in the deepest part of our Dorothy brains we’re not thinking about schedules as much as shape, not about seasons that come and go but about what the map of the land of Dorothy looks like. The most important practical implication, which is also the most expensive, is that we keep all of the books in print and available. That’s not the sort of thing that makes a very big impression on the outside world, I think, but it actually takes up a lot of time and resources.

In your conversation with Jeff Jackson for BOMB, you write: “[Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return]’s plentitude is made up of people living mostly in solitude, finding connection through media, though I will say I’m not entirely skeptical of the connections media affords. I mean, mediation is a fact of our lives, and we find our connections where we can, and I’m less interested in diagnosing loneliness and alienation than in thinking about how the sites of intimacy change as the world changes. And books, of course, are a form of media and a site of intimacy as well.”

This called to mind something Richard Nash wrote in Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century, “Books, like the tables and chairs, have receded into the backdrop of human life. This has nothing to do with the assertion that the book is counter-technology, but that the book is a technology so pervasive, so frequently iterated and innovated upon, so worn and polished by centuries of human contact, that it reaches the status of Nature.” Juxtaposing this with Renee Gladman’s comments on the technologies that appear in the Ravicka novels, whether geoscography (the measurement and study of the migration of buildings) to the complex technologies of human bodies that she references, how do you see the place for the various forms and ways of reading in today’s world (whether it be reading the expression on another’s face, a screen, or a physical book)? Where or how do you believe physical books facilitate connections, however broadly or narrowly defined?

Books facilitate all sorts of connections. The ones that interest me most are the connections with the (implied) author, with different ways the world has been thought about in the past or might be thought about, with values similar or dissimilar to my own, and with literature as an art form, as a living changing space. Those are the ways books feel most connective to me. I’m less interested in how books facilitate social connections, for example via social media. I’ve nothing against it, it just doesn’t have anything to do, for me, with the connections literature makes uniquely possible. That’s literature as content for some other sort of social interaction, replaceable by just about any other content. 

I like Lewis Hyde’s “gift economy” idea and Wayne Booth’s choice of the metaphor “friendship” to describe why we read. For the good company. It seems almost too simple, but when I consider how much of the company that contemporary culture offers seems thin and fleeting, it does strike me that “for the good company” is the fundamental reason I read.

I can’t really speak to Richard’s quote. Renee I’ve always felt is less interested in “saying something” than in expanding the range of possibilities for what might be said (or thought), and this is how I read her books’ relationship to its thematic content.

In THE MILLIONS, you and Stephen Sparks discuss “the idea of the professionalized author”: “I would then attempt to describe the pleasure I get—with Diderot—from feeling that what I am reading is written not by a ‘professional’ but by an incredibly smart and interesting friend.”

In The White Review, César Aira comes to a similar conclusion about the professionalization of the novel, finding a possible alternative in “the avant-garde, which, as I see it, is an attempt to recuperate the amateur gesture, and to place it on a higher level of historical synthesis. In other words, it implies immersing oneself in a field which is already autonomous and considered valid by society, and inventing new practices within that field to restore to art the ease with which it was once produced.” Does Aira’s avant-garde alternative capture some of what Dorothy seeks to publish? What does the “interesting friend” offer that the “professional” does not?

Sure, that’s a good comparison. It’s like when Roland Barthes reminds us that the root of the word “amateur” is love—amo, amare. The word “avant-garde” is less accurate to my way of thinking about these questions, because embedded in an “advance guard” is the notion of progress and a Modernist emphasis on destruction and newness, whereas I think the way out of stultifying conventions can as easily be found looking backward as looking ahead. I teach a course called “Experimental Traditions” that basically argues that a lot of stuff we have historically called “new” is simply participating in traditions outside of the mainstream of the day; it is “new” in the sense that it is new to us, but it is not new to literature. This distinction is important to me not because I think newness is bad, or because I think nothing is legitimately new—some things are certainly new—but because the real point is not to be new but to be interesting, to be lively, for literature to feel like it is in the midst of life, wrestling with fundamental questions of how we put our lives, our stories, our language together. 

When writing becomes a matter of mastery, of performing perfectly the expected steps, when it takes for granted how life is or should be and fails to convey any aspect of the messiness of making, then for me all the life drains out of it. The Dorothy list is full of life and energy, though. The spirit of trying things out. Each book does something different but what they all have in common is this freedom, not always a striving after “the new” but a carefree quality, a lightness in the face of expectation.

Danielle Dutton described Dorothy as “publishing-landscape adjacent, maybe. Or maybe there’s a whole other landscape developing on the outskirts, a landscape of outskirtness” characterized by “slow, sustainable, feminist, innovative” aesthetic. From the business side of publishing, do you see a landscape developing, something that is if not counter to the Big 5 (Hachette, Harper Collins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster) than at least attempting to create something new, dissociated from the professionalization (or hypercorporatization) of publishing in the United States? Outside of New York City, how does the physical landscape of St. Louis play into the work of Dorothy?

I love living in St. Louis, but I can’t say it’s a great place for publishing. Probably living here helps us stay mentally free of some of the less healthy hubbub of NYC. Less stress. But the only real benefit—which is a make-it-or-break-it benefit—is that our university jobs here, coupled with the low cost of living, allow us to publish whatever we want without having to worry about whether or not it will make money. Without that, Dorothy couldn’t exist. 

But whatever non-commercial attitudes we might personally foster, at the end of the day Dorothy operates within the commercial publishing ecosystem. We are trying to get reviews in the same publications Random House is trying to get reviews, and that requires personal connections that someone in NYC is much better positioned to maintain. So far we have done pretty well despite those challenges, but each year it gets harder to keep up with who is working where (everybody in New York seems to change jobs every six months). 

There are presses we consider our colleagues who take greater advantage of their position outside of the commercial sphere, physically and philosophically. Two Dollar Radio is a brilliant example of how a press with a primarily national and international audience can become a leader in local culture. And there are others. But that all takes a lot of time, and a certain kind of ambition—it becomes a fulltime endeavor—and one thing we have always been good at, and hopefully will remain good at, is making sure we don’t take on more than we can do and do well. Limiting our range of activity has always been part of the Dorothy ethos; doing very few books and giving every ounce of energy we have to them.