Book publishing is a business conducted largely by middlemen. Its language is the language of percentages, commissions, royalties, rates, cuts, fees, and takes. As the product moves along from seller to buyer, everyone–agent, publisher, distributor, wholesaler, retailer–skims, accounting for an unkind and paradoxical reality for the middleman: book publishing is largely a business of thin (and thinning) profits. But of course there are exceptions.
After studying for his PhD in 19th-century American literature at the University of Chicago, Curt taught for three years in the late 1960s and early 70s at Northwestern. There he met Linda, a fellow English instructor who’d just finished her doctoral course work at Tufts. They had adjoining offices then, and today they work even more closely, sharing an office on the first floor of their headquarters, a former bicycle factory at 814 N. Franklin. Neither ever completed a dissertation. Instead, they and a fellow grad student (who remained involved only briefly) started Chicago Review Press. Curt had been the poetry editor of the U. of C.-based journal of the same name and got permission to poach it–he liked the literary connotations.
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Back then they supplied local bookstores out of the back of their station wagon. Their largest customer was Kroch’s & Brentano’s, the huge and beloved independent Chicago bookseller that went out of business in 1995. For a time they owned a bookshop themselves, a tiny storefront on Walton next to the Drake. But it brought in a negligible income, and they sold it in 1976 to go at publishing full-time.
Around this same time the so-called mall stores B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, precursors to the colossal national chains that would soon come to dominate book retail, started springing up. Where before there had been thousands of mom-and-pop stores for publishers to deal with there were now the centralized buying offices of a few corporations–and they refused to deal with the accounts of thousands of small presses. It wasn’t worth their time. If a house couldn’t do $500,000 worth of business for a chain, the chain wouldn’t be buying books from that house, and the gates to an enormous sales channel were effectively closed to small presses. (The big New York houses, of course, could easily do $500,000 in business, and today for the most part publishers such as Random House and Simon & Schuster distribute their own titles.)
Yet since 1987 IPG has doubled its sales every three or so years. Its revenue increases, on average, 15 to 20 percent a year. In 2007 Curt projects the parent company will gross somewhere between $60 million and $70 million, and 90 percent of that will come from IPG. The company represents more than 400 publishers, and 50 or 60 of them account for most of the business. (In sales, Chicago Review Press is the biggest of IPG’s clients.) IPG’s catalogs contain more titles each year (about 1,600) than Simon & Schuster’s. Last year it acquired Trafalgar Square, a U.S. distributor of books published in the UK. The company now employs 110 people, from editors to sales managers to warehouse logisticians, and has hired 15 new staffers in the last year, while other publishers maintained hiring freezes or laid people off. Sales industry-wide have been more or less flat for ten years, but IPG continues to see double-digit growth. In the small-press world, Linda says, “people bemoan the loss of independent booksellers. But the fact of the matter is that the chains and the Internet have been great things for our company.”
That mind-set has led them to steer clear of some publishers altogether. “We’ve had not-for-profit publishers that we’ve tried to sell,” says Curt. “But it has never worked out that well. The not-for-profit mind-set is: if I’m out of money, I need to raise money. The for-profit mind-set is: if I need money, sell more books. I’m not running a charity or a summer camp.” He pauses, and adds, “You wake up in the morning and realize that there are 110 people working here. I’ve got an obligation. I damn well better make good decisions.”
Five years ago Dallas-based BenBella Books was a one-man show: Glenn Yeffeth, a former management consultant who had yet to publish anything and had no experience in the book business. He came to IPG with proposals for a biography of Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and a book of essays called Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix. Matthews and company thought the Matrix book looked promising and agreed to take BenBella on. It’s sold 25,000 copies to date.
