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Monday, June 21, 2010

SWET Newsletter, No. 124

Roundtable

Translating Shiba Ryōtarō‘s Saka no Ue no Kumo, with Juliet Winters Carpenter, Andrew Cobbing, Paul McCarthy, Saitō Sumio, Takechi Manabu, and Noda Makito

In 2009, translation got underway of best-selling novelist Shiba Ryōtarō‘s eight-volume Saka no ue no kumo (working title, “Clouds Above the Hill”), a planned three-year project funded through Japan Documents, an independent publisher under the direction of Saitō Sumio. The translators are Juliet Winters Carpenter (professor, Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts, Kyoto), Andrew Cobbing (professor, University of Nottingham, U.K.), and Paul McCarthy (professor, Surugadai University, Tokyo). Two Japanese translators experienced with J-E translation, Takechi Manabu and Noda Makito, are also helping with the project as translation checkers. SWET asked the translators, publisher Saitō, the two checkers, and Phyllis Birnbaum, editor of the translation, to discuss their perspectives on and experiences with the project so far. As of April 2010, translation of three volumes of Shiba’s novel have been completed.

SWET Events

Walking through History and Writing about Culture, by Enbutsu Sumiko

On a hot July day in 2009, SWET’s Summer Party featured a kaiseki lunch at the Kantokutei restaurant in Tokyo’s Koishikawa Kōrakuen garden and a talk by Sumiko Enbutsu. Enbutsu, author of Discover Shitamachi: A Walking Guide to the Other Tokyo (1984), Water Walks in the Suburbs of Tokyo (2000), A Flower Lover’s Guide to Tokyo (Kodansha International, 2007), and other walking guides to Tokyo and surrounding areas, spoke about how her books came about and some of the activities and research projects in which she has been involved. This article is a condensed and edited transcript of her talk.

SWET Member News

Saji Yasuo: I-House Press and English-Language Nonfiction Publishing in Japan, by Imoto Chikako

Saji Yasuo, publications officer of I-House Press, has been a member of SWET since its early days and is the proud owner of a full set of the SWET Newsletter. His career parallels that of many veteran SWET members, and he has been witness to the great changes that have taken place in publishing culture, technology, and English wordsmithing in Japan over four decades. Imoto Chikako’s article is based on an interview in Japanese with Saji at International House of Japan in October 2009.

SWET Cyber Matters

Red Card for Wordsmiths? SWET-L to the Rescue, by Torkil Christensen

Summary of threads on the mailing list SWET-L for the autumn and winter of 2009-2010. Wherein English stares at its second million words, Strunk & White mark their fiftieth, and the list remains attentively helpful but chides misspelling denizens of its cyber world.

Book Reviews

Selling Improved English, and the Dilemmas of Prescriptivism

Reviewed by John McCreery and Jens Wilkinson
Do You Make These Mistakes in English?: The Story of Sherwin Cody’s Famous Language School. By Edwin L. Battistella. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Hardcover, ISBN 978-0-19-536712-6.

A Semantic Adventure

Reviewed by Ginny Tapley Takemori
At Home in Japan: A Foreign Woman’s Journey of Discovery. By Rebecca Otowa. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 2010. Hardcover, ISBN 978-4-8053-1078-6.

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

In Memoriam: Florence Sakade

One of the last of the pioneers of postwar English-language publishing in Japan, Florence Sakade, died in Tokyo on February 21, 1999. She was eighty-two years old. At Charles E. Tuttle Co., where she worked for more than forty years, she edited, designed, and produced hundreds of books—many of them prizewinners and longtime best-sellers for the company. She also worked with and trained several generations of editors, many of whom now work in publishing on several continents and all of whom were influenced by her quiet professionalism, her sense of humor, and her dignity.

Florence’s life spanned three continents and most of the twentieth century. She was born in 1916 in Tottori Prefecture. When she was six years old, her family moved to Canada, where she was educated until she returned to Japan to attend Tokyo Women’s Christian College in the 1930s. After graduation she rejoined her family in Hiroshima, where she studied the traditional arts, worked in a kindergarten, and became a licensed pharmacist. After an arranged marriage, she lived with her husband in Manchuria for a little less than three years. She was detained, together with her young daughter, in what is now North Korea upon trying to escape the turmoil of World War II. After the war, she returned to Hiroshima, where she began working on children’s books for a Hiroshima publisher. Traveling often to Tokyo (at that time an 18-hour train trip) to obtain materials from the Civil Information and Education section of GHQ, she met Charles Tuttle, and began working for him when he set up his publishing company in 1958.

Working with some of the other giants of English publishing in Tokyo like Meredith Weatherby, Ralph Friedrich, Nobuki Saburo, and Bruce Rogers, Florence began to design, edit, and produce books for young readers—many of which are still in print. Her first book was Japanese Children’s Favorite Stories; it was published in 1958 and remains in print today. Another early Sakade book was Guide to Reading and Writing Japanese, which she compiled from scratch and which has been used by generations of Japanese language students to study kanji. A number of the books she went on to produce on the arts of Japan have received design and editing awards; authors she worked with include Donald Richie, Don Draeger, Hugo Munsterberg, Raymond Bushell, William Malm, and Andrew Nelson (of Japanese-English Character Dictionary fame.)

To dozens of people who worked with Florence at Tuttle as editors, proofreaders, and designers, she was a patient teacher and model of good design principles and high editorial standards. “Florence was simultaneously kind and exacting, and the combination made her a wonderful teacher,” remembers one. Always modest and self-effacing, she downplayed her own talents, but she followed and taught the basics of good editing: less is more; don’t change the meaning; editors shouldn’t resort to rewriting; never sacrifice good style to grammatical correctness. Even in her seventies, she was always open to new ways of doing things: “When I have to stop learning, I may as well give up,” she told one colleague. She could always laugh at her own mistakes: a former staff editor remembers Florence patiently telling a new proofreader to be careful of missing glaring typographical errors in display type, and then laughingly discovering that she herself had missed a misspelling of “Tuttle” as “Turtle” on a title page proof!

As a young designer, Florence worked with Meredith Weatherby, one of the best; and editors who worked with her continue to use her books as examples of clean, elegant typography. Over the course of forty years at Tuttle, she was responsible for more than 400 books, on subjects ranging from martial arts to architecture and in formats ranging from slim volumes of poetry to complete dictionaries and manuals. She saw each new book as a challenge—one that she relished.

In spite of being subjected to the time-honored Japanese form of “rationalization” in the form of a dramatic cut in pay when she reached the age at which she might have retired, Florence continued to hold the Tuttle editorial department together into her eighties. Her advice to younger co-workers was always the same.  “You must love what you are doing. Otherwise your editing becomes sloppy and you won’t be able to produce good books.” Her work inspired and energized her, and she kept a regular schedule at the office until well into 1998, when she was hospitalized with cancer. Until a few weeks before her death, she continued to work on a reduced schedule at Tuttle’s relocated offices in Kawasaki.

Florence was a dignified, self-effacing, and private person, with a quiet sense of humor and a unique blend of sophistication and innocence. She kept up with friends and relatives in many parts of the world, enjoyed visiting bookstores and attending art exhibits in Tokyo, and loved gardens and walking. A member of SWET since its founding, she attended a number of its social and professional functions over the years. She was devoted to her family, who included a daughter and two grandchildren in Tokyo and a brother in Canada, and for many years she cared for her aging mother at home.

To those around her, her energy seemed boundless: for decades she regularly walked the several kilometers between the Tuttle office in Bunkyo-ku’s Omagari and her home near Yasukuni Shrine, leaving younger colleagues in the dust with her brisk pace. Those of us who were privileged to know her—and occasionally to take that walk with her—will miss her curiosity, her kindness, and her enjoyment of life. The books she so lovingly made will remain as an inspiration and as a tribute to her great contribution to our community of the English word in Japan.

Susie Schmidt wrote this article, with help and contributions from Florence’s friends and former colleagues Becky Davis, Anita Feldman, Peter Goodman, Amy Heinrich, Susan Oki Mollway, Susanne Kirk, Michael Brase, and Steve Comee. Much of the biographical information was taken from an interview with Florence by Steve Comee and Nina Raj that was published in the December 1997 SWET Newsletter (#78).

Originally published in the SWET Newsletter, No. 85 (May 1999), pp. 18–20

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Self-Help for Editors

The Subversive Copy Editor—what a great title! That alone was enough to make me pick up a copy right away. The author is an experienced editor from the University of Chicago Press—producer of the style bible followed by many publishers, the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS)—who among other things edits the monthly CMS online Q&A fielding questions from readers all over the world (including a professor translating CMS into Chinese—er, what?).

More pertinent, however, is the understated subtitle in parentheses, for this is not a book about style, but about the job itself and what it involves. In her introduction Saller suggests that we should “consider this a ‘relationship’ book,” that writers do not need to be considered natural adversaries (take note!), that we need to be flexible and not hidebound by rules (hooray!), and that “ultimately, I’m hopeful that a reexamination of your role as copy editor can benefit all parties while liberating you from the oppression of unhelpful habits and attitudes.”

In “Part One: Working with the Writer, for the Reader” she elaborates on what some of these unhelpful habits and attitudes are, and how to avoid them. While taking our intelligence and education for granted, she points out some of the pitfalls, such as, “One of the most counterproductive assumptions for young editors to make is that they are going to be working against the recalcitrance of writers who are ignorant of the rules.” She emphasizes that a copy editor’s job is to “listen for the writer’s voice” rather than impose their own style, warning that, “For every writer with a tin ear who is helped by a competent editor, there is surely an inexperienced editor who will take a fresh and well-voiced text and edit the life out of it.” And as for sticking dogmatically to points of style, she observes that, “There’s a difference between the considered breaking of a rule and a failure to observe it out of ignorance.” The hallmarks of an “enlightened editor” are, as she puts it, contained in the mantra “Carefulness, transparency, and flexibility” (and the book is full of these effective little three-point lists).

She acknowledges that some writers may be “nervous” about the editing process, for various reasons, and advises how to approach this kind of situation in order to bring about the best solution for the manuscript. She also points out that “writers aren’t the only ones with ego issues,” advising editors to examine our own motivations saying that “when you decide to argue a point, it should be on the merits of that point, not because you feel you have something to prove,” and that although the writer may be a jerk, “even jerks can be right sometimes.” She adds some helpful advice in the event that the writer is a bully, advising tact and flexibility at all times while not allowing yourself to be browbeaten into submission. She caps Part One with a chapter dedicated to writers, advising them on why the copyediting process is necessary and how they can best work with their editor—and what to do if they feel the editor has ruined their work. I would recommend that editors read this chapter too, as it naturally illuminates some of the reasons writers can be unhappy with editing decisions.

Part Two is dedicated to “Working with your colleagues and with yourself.” Here Saller goes into the nitty-gritty of the editor’s working life, and gives coping strategies for when the going gets tough, such as dealing with mindless tasks or complicated tasks—and what to do when you goof. A whole chapter is devoted to “Know Thy Word Processor” and how you can save time on all kinds of mundane tasks. Another focuses on “The Living Deadline”—why it is important to honor deadlines, and how to manage your time accordingly. And what to do when it becomes impossible to meet a deadline. Two chapters are dedicated to editors working in-house and freelance respectively, with eminently sensible comments on aspects from office politics and behavior, and how good etiquette and practice will ultimately be to your benefit, to advice on how to charge for a project. Part Two ends with some apt advice on how much time and effort you should spend on a manuscript, given that “The manuscript does not have to be perfect, because perfect isn’t possible.” Finally, she rounds the book off with an appendix devoted to practical advice on how to get started in the editing world, entitled “You Still Want to Be a Copy Editor? Breaking In.”

All in all, there is nothing in this little book that sounds extraordinary, groundbreaking, or even particularly, um, well—subversive. However, the advice it contains is solid and pertinent, and I suspect it could be quite an eye-opener—possibly even life-changing—for some working editors. Saller’s humor is infectious, and helps her to make points effectively, so that even experienced editors happy with their working relationships will enjoy the read, as well as possibly picking up some useful suggestions and tips and gaining some beneficial insights. Numerous helpful links are provided, such as the free Microsoft Word resources provided on www.editorium.com, or the Editorial Freelancers Association’s guide to fees. Each chapter is prefaced with questions received at CMS online, to which Saller gives her rather caustic answers at the end of the chapter, by which time we’ve absorbed the lessons they contained and are able to laugh along smugly. It’s also a great little book to dip into: opening it up randomly at page 85, my eye fell on the line, “First, don’t make a habit of promising anything, especially to demanding personalities”; on page 93, “Play nicely.” And when all’s said and done, well, here I have to steal Saller’s last line: “‘Remember, it’s only a book.’ How deliciously subversive.”

(Originally published in the SWET Newsletter, No. 123, October 2009)

Saturday, November 21, 2009

SWET Newsletter, No. 123

Features

From Behind Cloistered Walls: A Tale of Two Translations, by Lynne E. Riggs

In February, In Iris Fields: Remembrances and Poetry by Abbess Kasanoin Jikun, edited by Barbara Ruch and Katsura Michiyo, was published by Tankōsha (Kyoto). The book’s prose was translated by Beth Cary and its numerous poems by Janine Beichman. In early April, Amamonzeki—A Hidden Heritage: Treasures of the Japanese Imperial Convents, edited by Patricia Fister and Monica Bethe, was published as the catalog for an exhibit co-organized by the Medieval Japanese Studies Institute (Kyoto), the Tokyo University of the Arts, and Sankei Shimbun Sha, which was held April 14–June 14 at the Tokyo University of the Arts. Both books may be obtained at http://www.chusei-nihon.net/index.htm. On May 23, taking advantage of the presence in Tokyo of several of the principal people involved in both projects, SWET held a special tour of the exhibit followed by a talk featuring Cary and Beichman and dinner at a restaurant in Ueno Park.

Remembering Jiho Sargent: Technical Writer and Buddhist Priest, by Naomi Otani

Jiho Sargent, long-time member of SWET and friend, advisor, and teacher to many SWET members, passed away in Oregon in June 2009 at the age of 77. On August 23, friends and SWET members gathered at Taisōji, the temple where Jiho had served as assistant priest, for a brief service and gathering to share the ways they remembered her. Jiho tells part of her own story in “Swimming with the Flow,” an article published in SWET Newsletter No. 90. Sargent’s Asking About Zen: 108 Answers (Weatherhill, 2001) is out of print.

SWET Events

A Poet’s Prose: The Economy and Voice of Moving, by Bonny Cassidy

Bonny Cassidy is an Australian poet and the president of Sydney PEN. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Sydney, and her first two collections of poems will be released through Puncher & Wattmann and Vagabond in 2010. In 2008, she received an Asialink fellowship to write a series of narrative essays on travel, art, and literature in Japan. In Kyoto on November 16, 2008, she spoke to Kansai SWET members about the process of departing from poetry to compose the collection of essays titled “Fields.”

SWET Open Forum 2009: Wordsmithing in Japan, by Katherine Heins

Where to go for translators’ resources, how to control your computer’s Japanese inputting settings, what an editor needs to know about word processing and other software, how to market your professional skills and carve your niche, how to get your work published, what to tell a Japanese author who wants his/her work published—these were some of the questions that were asked and answered on April 21, 2009, at the SWET Open Forum on wordsmithing in Japan.

SWET Member News

Talking Poetry with Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, by Leza Lowitz

SWET member Jane Joritz-Nakagawa recently completed her fourth book of poems, The Meditations, published by Otoliths. Her previous collections are Skin Museum (Avant Books, 2006), Aquiline (Printed Matter, 2007), and Exhibit C (Ahadada, 2008); the latter two are currently available at through both Small Press Distribution (http://www.spdbooks.org) and Amazon. She is an associate professor at Aichi University of Education in the city of Kariya, and founder of the annual Japan Writers Conference (http://japanwritersconference.org/) and the Peace as a Global Language Conference (http://www.pglijapan.org). SWET member Leza Lowitz, a writer, translator, and yoga teacher, interviewed Joritz-Nakagawa by email for this article.

SWET Cyber Matters

Lacunae of English, Manners, and Elucidations, by Torkil Christensen

Wherein the urbane denizens of SWET-L and the SWET Weblog solve wordsmith conundrums, proffer personal experience for the benefit of all, and fill in fine points of manners, grammar, and usage for questing SWETers. The Newsletter prints the high points of this rarefied and wittily provided expertise for your slow-time reflection.

Book Review

Self-Help for Editors, by Ginny Tapley Takemori

The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago (or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself). By Carol Fisher Saller. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. ISBN-13:978-0-226-73425-5, ISBN-10:226-73425-0, $13.00.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Some Notes on Anthologies

According to conventional wisdom, anthologies are a hard sell. Readers supposedly don’t buy them; reviewers are generally loath to review them; therefore, publishers tend to shy away from bringing them into print. Nevertheless, pick up any writing magazine and you’ll probably find a call for submissions to a forthcoming anthology. For example, in the January/February 2009 issue of the American magazine Poets & Writers, anthologists seek poems about bridges in New York City, poems about human rights violations, creative nonfiction about crepes, and poems set in San Francisco. Some of these editors have a book contract in hand, but others are putting together manuscripts with hopes of finding a publisher later—a process that can take years.

Although I am aware of the relative unpopularity of anthologies, I personally enjoy reading them, have written reviews of several, and have contributed to others. I’ve also conceived of, edited, and published three anthologies of my own. None of these books has made me wealthy, but they have been reviewed and have sold modestly well. Would-be anthologists sometimes ask me for advice on how to put together and publish collections of their own. Here it is.

Conception

First, you need an idea—one that is original, but also somewhat obvious. My first anthology, The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan, began with a one-page query to Stone Bridge Press, which specializes in books about Japan. Although I had no reputation to speak of, having only published a few stories in obscure literary journals, editor/publisher Peter Goodman liked my idea and had, in fact, been wanting to publish such a book. The concept was not particularly original. I discovered later that at least four other expatriate writers had had the same idea, and three of them contacted Peter after I did. I actually wound up working closely with two—Donald Richie and Leza Lowitz—who recommended and provided contact information for several writers who later contributed stories.

The idea for my second anthology—literature on raising a child with special needs—seems fairly obvious as well. In fact, in the year before Love You to Pieces: Creative Writing on Raising a Child with Special Needs was published, at least four similarly themed collections of essays were published. Mine, however, is the only anthology that includes poetry and fiction on the topic. Quite a bit of time—four years—elapsed between my conception of the anthology and its publication. If I had managed to get my book into print a bit earlier, I might have had a jump on the competition. However, in spite of some similarities to those other four books, Love You to Pieces fills an important niche. It is the first collection of serious literature—writing with an attention to craft—on parenting children with special needs.

My third anthology is based on another very timely concept—mothering across cultures. As the United States has just elected its first multicultural president, I sense that more attention will be given to multiracial and multicultural families. I’m sure that if I had not compiled such a collection first, someone else would have beaten me to it. Therefore, although I had been planning to devote my energy to finishing up my second novel, I sent a pitch for Call Me Okaasan: Adventures in Multicultural Mothering to Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing, an independent American publisher in the Pacific Northwest specializing in nonfiction on motherhood. Because I’d proven myself as an anthologist already, and because I’d racked up quite a few related publications, thus establishing a platform, I didn’t have to produce a manuscript up front. The publisher loved the idea and had faith in my ability to execute it. Within a week, I had a book contract.

Contributions

Once you have an idea, you need contributions. At the first annual Japan Writers Conference held at Ochanomizu University in 2007, Japan-based writer and anthologist Hillel Wright reported that he sometimes solicited work from writers and poets he’d discovered at open mike events and other readings around Tokyo. If, like me, you live in a remote part of Japan where there are few literary events, this is not a viable option. Many would-be anthologists post or publish calls for manuscripts in publications such as Poets & Writers, or on websites such as Newpages.com. In seeking submissions for my first anthology, The Broken Bridge, I began by writing letters to Japan-based writers of fiction. (This was the pre-Internet age.) I also put out a call for manuscripts in various Japan-based literary journals. Although I expected an avalanche of submissions, my advertisements did not generate enough quality work for a book. Most of the stories included came about from direct solicitations to writers I’d discovered in literary journals, at writers conferences abroad, in publishers’ catalogs, and in libraries. I also made a point of asking contributors for suggestions of other writers whose work might be appropriate. I tracked down one writer—Meira Chand—by posting an announcement in a newspaper.

I’ve found that most writers, even well-established ones at the height of their careers, are generous and cooperative. Edward Seidensticker, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Bret Lott, for example, were all quick to grant permission for me to reprint their works in my anthologies even before I had publishing contracts for the books in question. Some writers (or, more likely, their agents) will inevitably ask about the publisher, the print run, and about who else is included. Others will ask about money. I find this understandable, and I believe that writers should be paid, whenever possible, for their work. Many established writers have neither the time nor inclination to produce original work for free. However, some would be happy to lend an anthologist a piece of writing that has been published elsewhere, and for which they have already been compensated, if the project is of interest.

In my opinion, a good anthology is focused, and yet covers a wide range of viewpoints and topics within that focus. In The Broken Bridge, I aspired to have fiction ranging more or less evenly over the years from post-World War II to the 1990s, written by both men and women, minorities, and several different nationalities. For my second anthology, Love You to Pieces, I sought poetry, fiction, and essays on a range of disabilities, and on children from birth to adulthood, by both mothers and fathers. Since mothers typically take on most of the childrearing duties, it didn’t seem necessary to have an equal representation of mothers and fathers. Because the book was aimed at a multicultural American audience, it was important to include minority writers. Thus, in some cases I favored work by minority or male writers over equally excellent pieces by white women. Since my publisher’s catalog reflects a respect for diversity, my editor agreed with my choices. My third anthology, Call Me Okaasan, includes a more or less equal number of essays by expatriates, adoptive mothers, and women married to men of a different culture. The contributors are mothers of different religions, ethnicities, and nationalities.

Compensation

An anthology is usually a labor of love. Most publishers will not offer to pay contributors or even finance permissions fees for previously published work. In order to pay writers, anthologists generally have to reach into their own pockets. In putting together The Broken Bridge, I was able to avoid hefty fees because most of my selections were from out-of-print books, and the copyrights had already reverted to the authors. This was the case with Edward Seidensticker’s story. Other pieces came from small presses, which tend to request only modest fees. I wound up paying only a few hundred dollars.

In the case of Love You to Pieces, however, I’d started out planning to include an excerpt of Jewel, a best-selling, Oprah-approved novel by Bret Lott. Because the domestic and foreign rights had been divvied up and the novel had been published in several countries, I had to get permission from the book’s British publisher as well as the American publisher. I paid over a thousand U.S. dollars for reprint rights for Lott’s work and for other essays and stories excerpted from books. Keep in mind that writers—and anthologists—must get written permission (which often costs money) for snippets of song lyrics and poetry, also. Fortunately, my publisher paid me a modest advance out of which I was able to cover permissions fees and pay contributors, with a little left over to finance a trip back to the States to promote the anthology in bookstores.

In many cases, however, editors are unable to offer monetary compensation for contributions. As a contributor to several anthologies for which I was paid in copies, I appreciate the intangible benefits of having my work appear in a book. Anthologies are reviewed more often in literary journals or magazines, are sold at both brick-and-mortar and online bookstores, and are bought by libraries. I have heard from more readers who have come across my work via anthologies than from those who stumbled across a story in one of the hundred or so magazines or literary journals where my writing has appeared. Also, I’ve been given at least one well-paying writing assignment based on a contribution to an anthology. As a reader, if I enjoy an essay or story or poem, I often flip back to the contributors’ notes to see what else the writer has published. If that writer has a book in print, I am inclined to seek it out. Therefore, while a famous author’s contribution might bring readers to a book, an emerging writer might attract more readers to his or her work through contributing to an anthology, whether or not there is cash involved.

I received no advance for my anthology Call Me Okaasan, so I was unable to pay contributors for their original essays. However, I allowed the writers to retain rights to their work, which means that they can sell their essays to paying publications. I am also marketing first serial rights (rights offered to newspapers or magazines to publish a manuscript for the first time) to individual contributions, which could potentially generate income for the authors. The writers are also entitled to buy copies at a discount to sell for profit.

Marketing

Now, more than ever, book authors are expected to take an active role in marketing their books. The same is true for anthologists. These days a standard book proposal includes a marketing plan. When my most recent anthology, Love You to Pieces, was under consideration at Beacon Press, I was asked to supply information on how the book could be marketed. I made a list of potential reviewers and probable markets. I also solicited comments via my blog to show that there was an eager readership awaiting the publication of my book when the publisher wondered if anyone would actually want to read it. Presumably Beacon Press, a mid-size independent publisher with a long history, has a reasonable amount of expertise and experience in selling books. Even so, I found that most of the ideas in my report were implemented.

The Seattle-based feminist publisher Seal Press has published a number of anthologies over the past few years. In their guidelines for submission, they suggest that proposals include three niche-marketing areas. I have found this to be useful. If an anthology is too general, it is apt to get lost in the shuffle. If a small, but specific market—or two, or three—exists, it is easier to attract attention. An anthology of poems about bears, for example, might be marketed to nature lovers via wildlife-related publications and national park gift shops; to professors and students of poetry; and to general-interest publications in areas where there are many bears (such as Hokkaido or Alaska). For my first anthology, The Broken Bridge, these niches were Japan, travel literature, and literary fiction. For Love You to Pieces, I targeted parenting publications, magazines and websites focused on disability issues, and universities with disability studies programs. My anthology, Call Me Okaasan, is intended to appeal to readers familiar with my previous books, essays, and stories, and is being marketed especially to mothers, expatriates, and adoptive parents.

Alternatives

All three of my anthologies are published by mid-size independent presses in the United States, and my advice is based on these experiences. Obviously, publishing practices vary by country. (British publishers, for example, don’t seem to be quite so expensive as American ones when it comes to granting reprint rights.)

Also, although I think that much of what I have outlined above can be applied universally, there are other options for getting a book into print. For example, the latest print-on-demand technologies allow editors to compile and publish anthologies with small print runs, little overhead, and little risk. By using the Internet, it is easy to find and market to niche audiences for the most obscure of topics. So while reports from commercial publishers may be bleak, if you have a great idea for an anthology, don’t let bad news stop you. Just don’t expect to get rich.

Originally published in the SWET Newsletter, No. 122 (May 2009), pp. 13–19.

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