Archive for category: Latest News

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When frontlist is backlist . . .

Last week Dan outlined one of the eternal conflicts of independent publishing: the challenge of keeping books available for readers to discover, in an industry that is perpetually forward-focused, and within the pesky confines of time and space, i.e. in the face of return windows and the media’s own short attention spans, as well as the physical limitations of our vast yet rapidly overflowing warehouse shelves. (Speaking of the warehouse, our warehouse sale—200+ Biblioasis titles for five bucks a pop—continues through Labour Day.)

Given our ongoing obstinacy in the face of short (shelf and otherwise) lifespans, there’s a particular pleasure in saying that the most recent hot new Biblioasis release happens to be a book written thirty years ago: The Utopian Generation, by the great Angolan writer Pepetela. A Geração da Utopia was first published in its original Portuguese in 1992 by Dom Quixote. (And no, a windmill is never just a windmill.)

Photo: A copy of The Utopian Generation waits impatiently at Biblioasis Bookshop for you.

The Utopian Generation tells the story of four young revolutionaries and their fight for Angolan independence from Portugal. The four are living in Lisbon at the start of the War of Independence, and each must make choices that will have dire consequences for their futures. The novel follows them on their individual trajectories, from the optimism and passion inspired by the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), to guerilla combat in Angola and the disillusionment of world-tested ideals and their gradual understanding of the self-renewing global hegemony of capitalism.

Richly detailed in its depictions of African and Portuguese culture, and peopled by vividly drawn characters whose lives reveal intricate insights into the racial and psychological tensions of colonialism, The Utopian Generation is widely considered in the Portuguese-speaking world the seminal novel of African decolonization, companion to novels like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood, Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. You’ve certainly at least heard of these books, but without an English-language translation available, Pepetela’s novel has remained largely undiscovered outside of Lusophone cultures. We are terrifically excited that this edition, brought to us by longtime editor Stephen Henighan, and masterfully translated by the great David Brookshaw, is poised to change that fact.

Photo: Stephen Henighan (left) presents Pepetela (right) with copies of the English translation of his novel.

. . . and the future is the past

We’ve worked with David Brookshaw on a number of projects, among them the novels and short fiction of Mozambican Mia Couto. The Utopian Generation is a book he’s known and loved—and taught—for as many years as English-language readers have been unaware of it. We sat down to ask him a few questions about translation, but also about the context in which the novel was written, and what he said confirmed our strident belief that some of our most important lessons have already been learned, and can be applied anew to our contemporary concerns.

Biblioasis: The way the novel represents the diversity of Africa and Angola, culturally, racially, and the ways the struggle for independence united people across differences, is fascinating. Can you speak to the ways this diversity makes The Utopian Generation such a dynamic novel?

DB: One of the great challenges the Angolan nationalists had to face was how to forge a sense of common purpose and identity in a country whose borders had been created artificially by competing European colonial powers in the 19th century, to the extent that an African ethnic or linguistic group might find itself divided by a hastily drawn international frontier. This was the case of the old Kingdom of the Congo, part of which found itself owing its allegiance to Belgium, and the other part to Portugal as a result of the Congress of Berlin in 1885.

When the anti-colonial struggle started to gather strength from the 1940s, the challenge in Angola and the other territories ruled by Portugal was to overcome local rivalries, which had often been stoked up by the colonial authorities. In Angola, these nationalists embarked on a journey that might lead to a sense of “angolanidade” (Angolanity). Pepetela’s novel confronts this problem through the interactions of its characters (most of whom come from different ethnic, regional, or linguistic backgrounds), and their discussions, whether in the student canteen in Lisbon, or while sitting around a campfire in the middle of the Angolan bush, or, after independence, by a beach in southern Angola or in an apartment in Luanda.

The dynamism of the novel is propelled forward not only by the changing experiences of the characters in the different historical moments and locations, and their shifting ideals (or lack of ideals), but by debate and conversation.

Photo: Angola, Portuguese troops gathered in Luanda, 1961. Designer Zoe Norvell found this photo from the American Geographical Society Library (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries) and incorporated it into the book cover.

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Speaking of conversation . . .

We were delighted to see Olivia Snaije’s interview with Pepetela up at The Africa Report last week. Snaije outlines some of the autobiographical elements of the novel’s construction—like his protagonists, Pepetela was a student in Lisbon at the outbreak of the war, and, like two of them, he fought as a guerilla for the MPLA—and also shares the astonishing circumstances of the book’s composition and the impact of its publication:

Pepetela wrote the nearly 500-page The Utopian Generation in just one year while on a writer’s residency in Berlin. “We thought we would create paradise, but things didn’t turn out how we had thought they would,” Luanda-based Pepetela tells The Africa Report from Lisbon.

When the book was published in 1992, it became a bestseller and had the effect of a bomb due to its disillusionment and critical stance towards the corrupt post-independence government.

“My friends with the MPLA in Angola weren’t happy at all,” says Pepetela, adding that he wasn’t persecuted but that many of his friends dropped him. Today, he says, “these friends are even more critical than I was”.

The late academic Fernando Arenas wrote that The Utopian Generation was “the first novel to offer a sustained, probing, heart-wrenching as well as in-depth critique of the postcolonial national project.”

Photo: Pepetela, author of The Utopian Generation. Credit: Jorge Nogueira

You can read the interview in its entirety here. And, thanks to Stephen Henighan and David Brookshaw, you can now read a classic of African literature in English, just thirty-two years after its original publication—thereby proving once again: backlist is fiction.

Vanessa Stauffer
Managing Editor

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Keep up with us!

• May Our Joy Endure by Kev Lambert (trans. by Donald Winkler) will be available on September 3, 2024.
• The Notebook by Roland Allen comes out the same day on September 3, 2024.
• A Way to Be Happy by Caroline Adderson can be purchased on September 10, 2024.
• The Pages of the Sea by Anne Hawk comes out in Canada on September 17, 2024.
• Comrade Papa by GauZ’ (trans. by Frank Wynne) will be published on October 8, 2024.

Want to get new excerpts, musings, and more from The Bibliophile right away? Sign up for our weekly newsletter here!

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I’ve been thinking a lot in recent months about backlist. For those unfamiliar with the term, backlist refers to a given publisher’s catalogue of previously published titles that remain in print and available to the market. The designation distinguishes those books from frontlist, the ones that a publisher has only recently published, usually over the past year, and is still actively working to promote. The Oxford English Dictionary, which credits first use to Stanley Unwin in his 1946 edition of The Truth About Publishing, says that it is a catalogue of “books still available for sale by a publisher or bookseller, but no longer classified by him as ‘current’ or ‘new.’” Backlist is therefore a relatively new concept in publishing, less than eighty years old, though a tremendous amount of ink, both in contracts and media, has been spilled on the subject since.

Photo: Biblioasis inventory (seen above) is meticulously tracked by Emily Stephenson-Bowes, our Operations Manager

The majority of a publisher’s available catalogue, unless they’ve only started or have published limited runs for a set market, will almost always be backlist; and generally speaking, the more a publisher’s sales come from the backlist, the healthier and more stable they are. Backlist makes up anywhere between 50–80 percent of the average multinational’s sales, though for smaller independent publishers, perhaps especially in Canada, it’s quite often a fraction of this. At Biblioasis, we’re in a relatively healthy position, with 35–40 percent of our sales coming from our backlist of more than four hundred titles (though, in truth, only a small percentage of our backlist titles contribute much to these sales). There’s only one trade book in our soon-to-be-twenty-year history that’s gone out of print. A decade ago, in the Globe and Mail, Mark Medley wrote, exasperated, that in his time covering Canadian books, he’d “never met a publisher more convinced of the greatness of their every book,” and asserted that I believed we’re getting stronger every year. I’m still that publisher, I still believe that our list, almost every year, is better than the last (and yes, this year’s is the best ever), and I’ve therefore made a commitment to keep all of our books, whenever humanly possible, available for people to discover.

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As most reading this likely know, I got my start in books twenty-six years ago by opening a used bookstore, which means most of my bread and butter was backlist and out-of-print books. I was always much more thrilled to discover a signed Whitman photo in a moldy banana box (true story!) than to get my hands on the hottest new release; very little has changed in the intervening years. It was the near-constant demands I received for certain out-of-print regional history books—especially Marty Gervais’s The Rumrunners—that started me thinking about publishing in the first place, so the press in a very real way was formed to service backlist. And as the primary buyer for our current bookshop—now majority new—I’ve paid particular attention to growing our backlist holdings over the past five years; as a result, our sales have more than doubled. It struck me that, for many readers—at least to judge by our own shop, they are getting younger—backlist is a fiction: every unread book, every undiscovered author, is a new discovery to a reader, no less fresh and current than a title only released last Tuesday. To the TikTok generation, Dostoevsky may well be just another angsty, bearded hipster; and thanks to TikTok we sell a lot of Dostoevsky. If I could just get the best of what we’ve previously published in front of more people, including Caroline Adderson’s A History of Forgetting, Russell Banks’s Foregone, Mike Barnes’s Sleep Is Now a Foreign Country, Clark Blaise’s This Time, That Place, Mark Bourrie’s Bush Runner, Randy Boyagoda’s Original Prin, Craig Boyko’s Psychology and Other Stories, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s Case Study—and I’ve only quickly skimmed through to the B’s (forgive me, dear authors, any omissions: you were next on the list!), I think people would be thrilled with what they find.

Photo: Books within boxes lie dormant upon colourful metal shelves

Despite the promise that the internet would make everything available, as things have shifted from enthusiasts to algorithms real discoverability has never been harder. The relentless focus on the new, the current and the forthcoming, has made it increasingly difficult for books published only a few months earlier to discover their readers, let alone books published seasons before. If you can’t find a review anywhere, if it’s not available, even spine out, on a bookseller’s shelves, what chance does a reader have to find it? There’s nothing new about this complaint. It’s even getting hard to keep new books on warehouse shelves: storage costs have gone through the roof, and one major distributor we work with has been pressuring client publishers to destroy every single book that is returned, billing publishers as much as 20 percent of list price merely to restock it. It’s destructive and, in my view, unethical, merely another example of large, almost monopolistic corporations putting profit ahead of purpose. Publishers are pressured to adopt new technologies, such as print-on-demand, to service all backlist requirements (and even some frontlist ones), and we’ve made use of it as we’ve needed to. But too often the quality isn’t close enough to minimum standards of our usual offset printing; when I was in Cincinnati this past March and found a POD edition of one of our books on the shelves at Downbound, I was very disappointed with its appearance, a disappointment that has only amplified over the ensuing months. I wouldn’t have bought that edition of the book, and I do not doubt that others have picked it up and put it down for the same reason. Which is a real shame, because it was one of the best books we published in the last year.

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So as a result, we’ve resisted relying overmuch on POD; we’ve resisted letting our distributor pulp our books immediately on return to the warehouse; we’ve tried to resist as long as possible pulping any of our books. It was one of the reasons we purchased our nine-thousand-square-foot building here in Windsor: to try and control our storage costs and to ensure that we could keep everything available. But the costs are still catching up with us: between our various warehouses, storage costs could be as high as 50,000 dollars this year: to a small press like ours, that is an awful lot of money. So: we’ve embarked on our first major (and only second overall) stock reduction in twenty years: we remain as committed as we ever have been to keeping all of our books in print, but we need to reduce inventory and attendant fees. We’ve offered the authors of affected books the opportunity to buy stock at a small fraction of the cover price; we’re looking into remainder options where it makes sense; and we’ll be pulping what we can’t reduce through other means, while maintaining enough stock to handle sales well into the future. If we need to reprint a book at a later date to supply demand, we will do so: at this point that is still a much cheaper option than paying for additional storage. And, finally, we’re also offering readers the opportunity to stock up on some exceptional books at a fraction of the cover price: from hundreds of titles, at five dollars a book. You can pick up the aforementioned Adderson and Blaise and Boyagoda and Boyko (though not the Bourrie or the Burnet!), and many others, books that I still love (All Things Move and As You Were and The Iconoclast’s Journal and Martin John and The Party Wall and Zolitude, to scan the alphabet in five titles) as much as some of the new books we’re excited to put before you in the coming months. So, please, stock up: it’s taken twenty years for us to reach this point, and if I have my way it’ll be twenty more before we have a sale like this again.

Photo: The opening scene of a horror movie about an indie publisher who runs out of storage space

Just do me a favour: if you read something you love, please tell someone: word of mouth still remains the best recommendation engine, and every single one of these authors and books deserves to be more widely discovered and read. Thank you, and happy reading (and ordering).

Dan Wells
Publisher

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Keep up with us!

• Hello, Horse by Richard Kelly Kemick released on August 6, 2024, was praised in The Miramichi Reader and The British Columbia Review.
• The Utopian Generation by Pepetela (trans. by David Brookshaw) is coming out on August 13, 2024.
• May Our Joy Endure by Kev Lambert (trans. by Donald Winkler) will be available on September 3, 2024.
• The Notebook by Roland Allen comes out the same day on September 3, 2024.
• A Way to Be Happy by Caroline Adderson can be purchased on September 10, 2024.
• The Pages of the Sea by Anne Hawk comes out in Canada on September 17, 2024.
• Comrade Papa by GauZ’ (trans. by Frank Wynne) will be published on October 8, 2024.