What is the role of the small magazine or press in today’s literary marketplace? Publishing has rapidly become big business in a way unimagined just thirty years ago, and both the writers and readers of serious fiction and poetry often feel shut out. Where do they go when the market is god, when the bottom line and not the luminous quality of the writing determines whether or not a book gets published?

Jim Sitter, executive director of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) hasn’t lost hope; in fact he tends to think of the ‘90s in terms of opportunity for small presses and literary magazines. He believes that lovers of fiction and poetry will increasingly turn to small publishers to fill the gaps left by large, multinational conglomerates interested mainly in mass-market books with a high profit margin.

Sitter feels that we can best understand the current literary publishing scene by putting it into historical perspective. “Beginning in the mid-1950s” he says, “in part for estate tax purposes, individuals like Alfred Knopf took their privately held publishing houses public on the stock market, and this allowed publicly held corporations in other businesses—Gulf & Western, for example—to buy shares of stock.”

In the 1960s, he says, this trend continued, fueled by large profits in textbook publishing generated by the baby boom. “Outsiders entered the publishing business with a profit motive,” Sitter says, “and the days of genteel trade publishing, when a publisher could live quietly in Boston or New York off a small profit margin, came to an end.”

According to Sitter, the push towards creating publishing conglomerates slowed down, along with the stock market, in the early 1970s, but by 1975 it was back with a twist when, as he says, “publishing houses began buying out other publishing houses. You can see it in the statistics. In 1972 there were dozens of strong trade publishers and now there are fewer than a dozen. Bantam, Dell and Doubleday are now all the same company.

Beginning in the late 1970s another wave of conglomeration hit the publishing scene, this time with an international element. Viking was sold to a British conglomerate. The process gathered steam in the 1980s when Addison-Wesley was purchased by the same firm that had bought Viking, Bantam-Doubleday-Dell was sold to a German publisher, and a Japanese company acquired Putnam.

There was some unease about this trend within the industry,” Sitter says, “but not much public awareness of it until the late 1970s when the New Yorker ran a series of articles by Thomas Whiteside that criticized the phenomenon.” (The articles were later published as a book, The Blockbuster Complex: Conglomerates Show Business, and Book Publishing.) “Now,” Sitter adds, “gigantic corporations dominate the book industry and its relationship with authors, bookstores, the whole literary market; the trends that make it more effective for publishers to be larger and go for the mass audience will continue through the ‘90s.

The implications are clear, and again Sitter relies on statistics. “In 1965, major publishers brought out well over one hundred books of poetry; in 1988, they published forty-one. If you’re a very well-known poet or novelist, the commercial houses may still be willing to publish you,” he says, “but they will be doing fewer and fewer books by newer writers,” and, he believes, “the chances that they will stay with a new poet or novelist are small.”

Sitter does not think of this as necessarily bad news for serious writers or their readers. “In a giant company,” he explains, “overhead is attributed across the board to all of its products, from glossy gift books to novels. Higher overhead and investment of capital make these companies look for a product with a high degree of profit, and a high predictability of profit.” He believes that this trend will continue, with publishers looking for more consistent bestsellers like the books of Stephen King. “But,” he adds, “as the minimum number of books a large publisher has to sell to break even [currently 10,000 to 15,000] keeps rising, this leaves a huge window of opportunity for small presses,” operation that can still do well selling 3,000 to 5,000 copies of books aimed at a literary audience.

Sitter anticipates that in filling the gap left by larger publishers, small presses and literary magazines will publish many of the outstanding writers across the country, including experimental and multicultural work, that larger publishers are reluctant to bring into print. he believes that the publishing of poetry in particular “has pretty much been signed over to the small presses,” and predicts that by the end of the ‘90s, more major American poets will have grown up with small presses, which will be bigger, better, more competent and adept at promoting their books.

Sitter believes that small presses have already begun this process. “Publishers like Black Sparrow, Coffee House, Copper Canyon, Godine, and Graywolf, which flourished in the 1960s as hand-printing operations, found in the 1970s that the audience for their books had expanded so that editions of three hundred were no longer enough. They grew larger to serve the audience, and they now have good nationwide distribution.

As director of CLMP, Sitter sees as his role assisting small magazines and presses in taking advantage of the new opportunities available to them. Since joining the organization in July 1989, he has devoted much of his time to raising over $6 million in grant money, primarily from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund and the Andrew M. Mellon Foundation.

“Literature as a whole is so undercapitalized, the strategy of going for small grants seemed inappropriate for the early ‘90s” Sitter says. “So we went for very large grants and got lucky.” The ‘luck’ involved over eighteen months of Sitter’s working with both foundations, and the good news for presses and magazines, according to Sitter, is that 85% to 95% of these millions is going directly to them, to help them become stronger, larger and better staffed so that writers and readers are better served.

“CLMP is a service organization,” he explains, “and at first we thought we should raise money to develop programs of our own; the kinds of studies, workshops, and conferences that organizations such as our traditionally get grants for. But,” he continues, “we soon realized that small press people didn’t need to come to New York for marketing and staff development programs; often they simply couldn’t afford it. So we made a strategic decision to pump money into the field itself.”

In January of 1991 the Andrew M. Mellon Foundation made grants of $50,000 each to nine small presses: Arte Publico, Coffee House, Copper Canyon, Curbstone, Dalkey Archive, Graywolf, Milkweed Editions, Story Line, and Sun and Moon, and gave $270,000 directly to CLMP. Sitter estimates that roughly $100,000 of the CLMP grant has already been regranted to small presses and literary magazines. According to Rachel Newton Bellow, a program associate at Mellon, an expansion of these grants will be considered in October 1992 that may include a line of credit for small presses offering both access to technical assistance and working capital, for a total of $2.5 million.

In March of 1991 the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund gave CLMP $3 million to administer a program that will provide funds and technical assistance to small literary presses and magazines. Grants of $8,000 each will be available to help an estimated thirty small presses and magazines develop new marketing plans, followed by grants ranging up to $100,000 to help them implement these programs. Presses that have published at least eight books of a literary nature within the last two years, and literary magazines that have published at least four issues in the last two years, may apply directly to CLMP for assistance under this grant. All applicants must have 501(c)3 tax-exempt status.

One frustration for Sitter is that most of the grants made available in the 1980s and early ‘90s have gone to small presses rather than literary magazines. He hopes that foundations will eventually be able to treat presses and magazines equally, but notes that magazines have special problems, primarily sensitivity to postal rate increases and a distribution system inferior to that of presses, that have made it difficult for them to use development grants. He also notes that for literary magazines, “access to funding did not improve as much through the 1980s as it did for the presses.” For example, none of the Advancement grants initiated by the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1980s has gone to magazines.

Karen Leies, program assistant for Advancement grants at the NEA, expects that this will change in the 1990s as literary applications for Advancement grants continue to increase, and the NEA complete an overview of the program aimed at producing new guidelines for 1994. “So far,” she says, “while literary magazines have been eligible for Advancement grants, they haven’t been as competitive as small presses in applying.” She characterizes the application process as “rigorous” and the grant itself as “intensive,” requiring a staff that can devote one week a month for a year to the program. “We provide a consultant for thirteen months,” Leies says, “during which time a long-range business plan is developed.”

Sitter sees the NEA Advancement grants as having had a major impact on literary publishers. “The five presses that got the first Advancement grants—Arte Publico, Coffee House, Graywolf, Milkweed Editions, and Sun and Moon—all expanded considerably during the 1980s.” It was no accident that three of these five presses were located in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul, where the 1980s saw what Sitter terms “outstanding fundraising for literature and a great response among local philanthropists,” many of whom had never before supported literary projects. Two of the presses, Coffee House and Graywolf, relocated to the Twin Cities in part because of these new opportunities for funding.

Sitter himself was involved in this process, as founder of Bookslinger distribution service and, later, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, an institution that began in his apartment and is now a museum in downtown Minneapolis. “An amazing range of government and corporate leadership, along with individuals in the literary world, came together to change philanthropy in Minnesota to include small presses and the book arts,” he says.

Sitter sees his current job at CLMP as “doing nationally what was done in Minnesota. Changing the entire relationship of literature to philanthropy is the most important challenge facing American literature in the 1990s.” Defending the NEA comes second—“if we lose that,” he says, “the whole game goes.” The $6 million-plus that Sitter has helped raise in the last few years is a major step in what he hopes is a new direction for philanthropy in literature. “If the presses and magazines use these funds well,” he says, “then we can go back to the foundations, and also attract other American philanthropic organizations that have not previously funded literature.”

Sitter believes that the lack of other support has left literary publishing overly dependent on the National Endowment for the Arts, “and we have all become increasingly aware of the censorship problems there. But if you look at theater and dance, you see that even groups that are radical and idiosyncratic have been able to achieve a high level of support from other sources.”

Sitter hopes that CLMP will eventually “help create within the field of literature the kind of support that independent, nonprofit theater groups developed in the 1960s, and dance groups tapped into in the 1970s. “It’s our fault that literary publishers haven’t approached fundraising professionally.” This created what he terms “a sad situation” in which “small presses haven’t known how to raise funds, and philanthropists don’t understand the needs of small presses and literary magazines.”