5ish Questions with Krystal Languell
Is book distribution a feature or a bug?
Krystal Languell lives in Chicago. She is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Systems Thinking with Flowers, selected by Rae Armantrout as the winner of the first fonograf editions book contest, published in 2022. She works for a family foundation and in her unpaid time participates in dynamic resource mobilization with and for recently-arrived and formerly-unhoused folks. Additionally, she is the publisher of Bone Bouquet.
Hi Krystal! I wish we were talking under better circumstances, but despite that it’s a pleasure to chat with you. I want to start things off with a pretty basic question: What was your high level immediate reaction to the SPD closure?
Hi Andrew! My first reaction was disappointment, which quickly gave way to incredulity and ultimately a familiar kind of shock at the shamelessness and self-interest that the style in which the decision to cease operations was foisted onto the public like a grenade did so little to conceal. As days passed, and with the help of some friends, I came to see how SPD’s disappearance could lead to an extinction-level event for the U.S. small press ecosystem. I’ve had a variety of reactions!
I had another early series of thoughts around the matter of the fiscal responsibility of those involved. A working professional adult embarked on a breakneck speed reinvention of a decades-old nonprofit to bring it more in line with the multi-billion dollar book publishing industry, and he crashed and burned. A board of directors oversaw that person’s hire and performance in the Executive Director role. It is the board’s job to take action if an ED is failing or harming the organization. Where were those clever and experienced adults? Did SPD have Directors & Officers insurance? Why can’t I find the dissolution filing in the database of the CA Superior Court?
As with most huge violations of trust, the damaging effect of this closure will be felt much more quickly than answers will turn up as an analysis of the failure is gradually undertaken.
Let’s get into the details a bit more about how this is affecting you personally. Three of your four books were published by presses distributed through SPD (fonograf editions, 1913 Press, and BlazeVox [books]). Given that a lot is still changing, how is this impacting you as a writer? What’s happening to these books?
Oh, I don’t have any idea what’s going on with copies of my own books previously in the possession of SPD. I’m not really concerned for myself or my books because I always have adequate copies in my possession and I don’t imagine there were many of mine at SPD. I’m not a high-volume seller. Of course, I am concerned for the sake of my publishers’ survival. Fonograf recently started a GoFundMe to recoup losses.
Where I really see a powerful vulnerability is from the perspective of some small presses I have worked for in the past. It’s the publishers who are working the hardest to embody their values, who pay their authors royalties even though their staff is underpaid, who have the sincerest respect for poets that are the ones in the most precarious financial positions. Which is no place to be when suddenly your biggest customer drops dead.
You mentioned to me previously that you’ve encouraged editors and presses to move away from SPD for a long time. Tell me more about that. What prompted you to start those conversations about SPD? How did they go?
Yeah, even five or ten years ago I wasn’t all that impressed with SPD. And over a period of years, people convinced me that they did things we could not do on our own and so on. When I analyzed the quarterly statements Belladonna received from SPD I could see that we never made more than about $4.50 on a book sale, and that didn’t take into account the cost to ship books to SPD to fulfill their purchase orders OR the annual fee to SPD or the new title fee to SPD. In fact, it was pretty close to the per-copy cost of printing. Handselling a book for $10 was more profitable than selling the same book for $15 via SPD.
Some of that might be normal business facts and they only feel painful because we as presses are trying to apply a set of corporate principles to what amounts to our garage bands. The human spirit can only submit to this farce for a few weeks at a time or the duration it takes to put a grant application together. But it is not a match made in heaven. It cannot ever “work.”
Then when damagedbookworker exposed the inappropriate and hostile workplace conditions as well as the disqualifying financial oversight failures at SPD, it seemed my skeptical feelings had been based merely on the tip of a terrible iceberg. The ethical path seemed clear to me then–we should all move away from SPD as quickly as possible. I asked my publisher not to list my last book on SPD, but they said it was important for them to use it and I deferred to their needs, which affect many more people than my preference does.
Your comments have made me step back and realize something. So much of the conversation (see Publishers Weekly and NPR) to date has centered the mainstream bookselling system: publisher to distributor to bookstore. Even when the question is seemingly open-ended like “What will these publishers do?” the real question actually being asked is something much more narrow like “How will these publishers find a mainstream distributor again?”
I expect that many of these small presses need, believe they need, or want that model, but you’re pointing and advocating toward a real alternative. You seem to be taking a step back and asking more fundamental questions: Is this really helping us? What are we getting out of it? What are the other options if we just say “no” to this?
Presuming I’m not totally wrong (and if I am, correct me and take this in that direction), what does that alternative look like, in terms of how the publisher operates and also how that approach would impact the literary community at large?
Or, here’s maybe another way of framing it. So much of the discourse around small press publishing implies that the limited distribution is a bug that needs to be fixed, but you’re at least making me think about whether we should consider this a feature.
Right. The poet Marina Blitshteyn tagged me in a Facebook thread in which the poet Holly Melgard was talking about better digital solutions. Digital stuff is not my forte. But that’s a great direction for some poets and publishers!
I think the services and reach that distributors offer poets are largely imaginary. They convince us that our book being available on Amazon is a gift of activism to rural readers without access to local bookstores; that if our book is available from the major distributor for Barnes & Noble (which now owns tons of university bookstores), it might be taught in college courses–bulk orders mean more royalties! Isn’t it a perverse pleasure, too, to imagine students being forced to study you, and in your lifetime? What a treat.
But this shit just doesn’t happen for most poets. Maybe a friend of ours teaches our book. We’re like gambling addicts in a few ways. One of which is that we keep believing we could win it all.
The warehouse distribution does a little something and it does it poorly. It can keep existing, but we can also imagine a cornucopia of other schemes that could co-exist with it:
A utopic collectivized national network of presses in communication with each other who create a central publication schedule and subscription models so that a sustainable sales rate is maintained.
The same thing as above but international and ebooks only because shipping is so expensive.
A central website where all our presses and books are searchable, and a separate shopping cart fills up for each press you’re buying from.
A regional model of warehouse distribution featuring the publishers in the given region. Subscription models available to express regional pride! (This would make bank in the Midwest, I think.)
Other publishers are using their university’s horrible website to sell books. Everybody needs a website that auto-fills the shopper’s entire life story, like an Instagram store does, making it easier to impulsively buy books. When I have to type my address twice, I’ll give up on anything.
This has me going down a few different directions, many of them related to the overall changes in the literary and poetry markets. By that I mean the relationship with the academy. I think so much of our current system is still built off that brief and unsustainable moment where a substantive portion of the literary community was supported within the university system. And there was access to that loop you mention: writer gets hired by a university to teach and can make a livable wage, writer publishes a book on a press that’s financially underpinned by a university, and the writer’s friends add that book to their own syllabi for a semester or two producing some volume of sales.
And for certain select books and writers, that still happens. And while it was always just a select few who truly had access to that loop, it's far less attainable now than it was a few decades ago, due to the combined forces of universities pulling support for presses and departments alongside an increase in the size of the literary community.
This all seems to be this constant degradation, destruction, corruption. And that last word makes me go back to one of my favorite poems, Srikanth Reddy’s “Corruption.” There’s a lot going on in that poem, but the overarching theme is that everything degrades but as it degrades, something new is created. The conservation of mass and energy: these things cannot be destroyed, only changed in form. The poem is thus simultaneously melancholy and hopeful.
Thinking of that and to close us out: Are you hopeful that whatever comes next will be better, a light that we can read from? Or do you think is this an existential crisis and the larger economic forces (Amazon and B&N and Ingram monopolies, decline of university support, high cost and challenge of building tech platforms) will have a long-term devastating impact on the literary community?
I remain curious to see what comes next, without being either optimistic or pessimistic about it. Is that even believable? Maybe there will be a small press Depop or Etsy. The crisis, as the poet Jim Behrle has helped me to see, is that among the warehouses are important archives of American (or United Statesian) poetry. Possible entire remaining print runs of pre-digital era titles are at risk of destruction. That would be a tragic and irreversible loss.
As for recent, current, and future publishing ventures, I believe we’ll weather the storm. I hope against publishers shuttering as a result of SPD’s dereliction of duty. I wish upon a star that a wealthy foundation shall write a big check to Ingram to get us out of this mess, but I don’t hold my breath waiting for that wish to be fulfilled. I hope that we can step up to help each other out by buying and reading small press books, requesting them at the local library (include a link to the press where they can order direct?), writing reviews and otherwise talking about the books–not just the noise around the publishing mechanism.
I encourage you to support fonograf editions and all of their publishers, and become one of Krystal Languell’s readers.
And if you’re a publisher or writer who has been impacted in any way by SPD’s closure or wants to talk about possible paths forward, please message me using the button below.