Let’s say I have a manuscript of poems and send it to you. How would that become a Copper Canyon acquisition?
If you were to just send it to me as an e-mail attachment, I’d say, “Thanks, I’m not reading right now. Send your book through our open reading period.” During that period, the books come in and are assigned to at least two readers. And then we just go through and figure out how much further we want to pursue each of them.
This is for every one of the two thousand manuscripts you receive a year?
Yes.
Is the ultimate decision in your hands, or do you need to involve others who help manage the press?
It’s my job to decide. If I know a book will require significant resources, it becomes a management issue. In general, we have a budget and a certain number of slots. For those slots the editorial choice is mine—I’m looking at the larger budget, how much do we have already, what might this book sell, how to get the pieces to fit.
The Pablo Neruda book we recently announced was different. We knew we needed a large advance, that it was going to be a big print run, and that it was going to require a lot of staff resources. I knew that we should do it, and I wanted to do it, so I let people know I was going after it and kept them informed. I whooped and hollered on Christmas Eve when I got the manuscript, and by New Year’s, George Knotek and Joseph Bednarik and I were sitting down with some of our board members. Everyone thought we had to do the book, but also recognized it would be a challenge.
For books where we’re less certain of the sales or our ability to raise funds for them—they are questioned in retrospect, I guess, but I also know well enough that there are few risks that I can take as an editor—and I can only take them if they’re balanced with the other books. To an extent, my colleagues have to trust that I’m picking good material.
I’ve had a couple of instances when a book hasn’t done well and somebody asks what the hell I was thinking. I can say that it didn’t go as we expected, but the reasoning was sound. I try to create a mix. It’s almost like making a book. You don’t want to have all sonnets or villanelles or blank verse. If you can show a mixture that’s serving the larger whole, it makes for a more interesting book.
Tell me about working with your board of directors. Does that committee have a homogenizing effect on your publishing choices?
Basically, I’m choosing books and trying to build a coalition around those choices. But I’m also choosing those books with input from other people as well. The board’s primary aim is to make certain that we’re being wise with the money that’s entrusted to us by donors—that’s their governance role.
Their other role is to get out and help us raise funds for the press. The way you get people excited about doing that is to get them excited about the books. The way you excite them about the books is by how you discuss the work. If an intern is really excited about a book, and conveys that excitement to me, and I convey it to the board, that’s not homogenizing at all. That’s bringing in all sorts of different perspectives.
We are all cognizant that this is a business, and we need to make money in order to convey the mission well. But the bottom line isn’t the mission. The mission is to create a vibrant body of poetry. How can we be creative within the strictures of that? How do we turn those limitations into advocacy?
In general, the way I’ve approached being our artistic director is to bring in different opinions and honor them and sometimes disagree with them. Now our challenge is how we take somebody’s first book and make an audience for it. When our board is holding me accountable, it isn’t going to be for the critical response to our work. It’s for what our business is like, and do we have the right product mix, if you will.
There have been years when we’ve not done as well. Is that because of the books, or because of the economy, or the state of philanthropy, or the book world? If you can articulate why you chose a book and what in the collection of poems made you want to choose it, for the most part we all recognize that some things can be a good choice aesthetically but the chips may not have fallen in our favor.
What do you consider when estimating the sales potential of a book?
We talk a lot about comps, or comparable titles—what’s out there in the world of poetry that is similar or that reflects what this book is going after. It might be the style of documentary poetics or addressing a certain topic. You figure out the comps, then go on to Nielsen BookScan to see how much they sold to develop a good target. You figure that you can expect a certain amount in sales.
Then we put that projection into our larger mix and shift pieces around—how it falls within our budget. You always hope for situations like when Ted Kooser came to us with Delights and Shadows. I had asked him what his best-selling book was: about 1,500 copies. I was a little cocky and thought we’d do better than that.
And then Delights and Shadows sold, what, a hundred thousand copies?
But we printed 2,000 or 2,500 copies at first. To me, that was already doing better than the last book. But we had no idea he would be named poet laureate and then win the Pulitzer Prize. That’s playing the lottery. We’re in a hits business. If the book is a hit, then you made a great decision. If it’s not, then…
Next time.
Next time. And if they’re consistently not, then I’m out of here. We’ve had some good runs, and some runs that have just been okay. I still love those books. There are a couple poets on our list whose work I just absolutely love, and who I will go to the wall for even though the rest of the world doesn’t see it yet. The readership isn’t there yet for whatever reason, but I think they’re brilliant. I will still advocate for those books. As an organization we’ve embraced the concept of what we call “mission books.” We need to allow for those, and sometimes those mission books end up exploding.
How did the new Neruda book come to Copper Canyon?
Pretty much every morning I read the New York Times, the Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and Huffington Post—a bunch of different things, just my regular wasting the morning over tea. Last summer there was an article in the Guardian about a newly discovered manuscript of Neruda poems. I immediately wrote to the foundation and to the agent. At that point scholars were still authenticating it. I just said that when it’s ready I’d love to have Copper Canyon see the manuscript. Then, after a couple more notes, I received an e-mail from one of the agents with the manuscript on Christmas Eve.
In the original Spanish?
The original with the ephemera. It was locked down tight. I could not even print it out. I read it on my computer, and thought, “Wow, these are good!” I didn’t expect them to be, but they were.
There is always that question with a lost manuscript. Was it lost, or was it discarded?
When I got it I told everybody here, and they already knew how I was champing at the bit. Right after New Year’s we met with a couple of our board members and told them about the opportunity: how we thought it was a big book and how it fit into the press given all of our other Neruda titles, what we’d need for an advance, how many copies we would print, a preliminary budget. We wanted the board to get behind it and to help us with fund-raising. A couple of these representative members agreed that we had to do it.
The first thing we did was set the advance with the agents. Then we turned to several key constituents and asked them to commit to providing what we needed. They came back and said yes, and we talked about the costs for the book itself. So we went ahead, knowing we had the advance covered and we had donors providing some more for the actual production.
Then we began to brainstorm our marketing plan, our publicity plan, how many galleys to print, what’s the postage to send them, what we’ll do on social media. We presented the Balcells agency, which represents the Neruda estate, with a full package. Finally we heard that the estate wanted to go with us, given the work we had already done with Neruda’s books in the past.
It was almost like a capital campaign. We joke that Copper Canyon is the house that Neruda built, so this gives us another opportunity to talk more about our whole list.
What is the process of bringing those lost poems to print in English?
I read the poems in Spanish and thought they were really good, but then we needed to decide on a translation with the agency. But to do good translations you do need to slow down. That’s why we sat on the information for a while—so that when we announced the book, we had some translations to use as examples for media.
Now that we’ve had them translated and copy edited, we’re moving toward design. Full color is a new thing for us, and we’re trying to figure out where to print, what the best design will be. Where do we want to go with this? We have a series that’s designed to go together; does this book do the same thing or does it cut its own path? Is it going to be hardcover or paperback?
It’s interesting to hear you describe a book as a capital campaign. If it takes off, it could supply years of future expansion for the press.
It’s also this: Neruda is foundational to this place, and this is shoring up that foundation. We have the whole body of his late work and some of his great love poems.
There’s a story I’ve told many times before about a couple who sent us a donation of five hundred or a thousand dollars here and there. One of our board members knew them personally and invited me to have lunch with them. Beforehand, I was told that the husband was a World War II veteran, a pilot, a hunter—a man’s man. I wondered what this guy was going to talk to me about.
