What Happened to Publishing: A Brief Retrospective

Before we can appreciate how bold it is to be “retro” in publishing these days, let’s remember what happened to the industry, especially in the United States, during the 1980s and 1990s. Those were the days of infamy, when the independent institutions of New York publishing—Random House, Simon & Schuster, Harper & Row, Penguin, and others—were being swallowed up by massive international media conglomerates such as Bertelsmann, CBS, and News Corporation.

Suddenly book publishers, who were accustomed to seeing profit margins between 3 and 4 percent, were expected to contend with their conglomerates’ film, cable television, and other media subsidiaries, which typically saw gains of between 12 and 15 percent. Under this enormous pressure to increase their margins, and with financial and marketing people now weighing in heavily on publishing decisions, editors became consumed by the hunt for the next blockbuster book (think Men Are From Mars, Women Are from Venus). Meanwhile, they could no longer “afford” to publish a title that was projected to sell fewer than 15,000 – 20,000 copies, regardless of its literary merit. In effect, the business of printing books, which had long been guided by a cultural mission to make literature and ideas available to the general public, was surrendered to the great, equalizing jaws of the market.

Publishing veteran André Schiffrin explains how market theory transformed the industry in “The Corporatization of Publishing” (The Nation, June 3, 1996) and at greater length in his memoir, The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (2000).

Erin Brown
Thomas Riggs & Company
Missoula, Montana

From Thomas Riggs & Co. Blog: www.thomasriggs.net/blog

Thomas Riggs & Company: Our History
Missoula, Montana

Thomas Riggs & Co., long known officially as Thomas J. Riggs Inc., began as a small group of former publishing employees, mostly from Encyclopaedia Britannica, who had moved on to become freelancers. At our jobs we had been given a traditional publishing education—an apprenticeship in which editors were patiently taught the minutiae of the craft—and we felt a common culture and kinship that made working together easier, despite our living in different cities.

Our first project, Contemporary Poets, published by St. James Press in 1995, was a revision of a long-established book of critical essays on poets. At the time few people were on the Internet, and we had to contact the 779 poets covered in the book the old-fashioned way—by mail or by phone and often by both. It brought both frustration and joy. Finding an Australian poet vacationing at her friend’s house seemed like a miracle, and talking with an insomniac young poet, now quite famous, who called late one night, was a curiosity that still lives vividly in my memory. So, too, we had to find writers to produce critical essays on the poets, but we were guided by a distinguished board of advisers, whose generosity was remarkable.

With our first foray into book development, the company began. But we were a nontraditional organization. We all lived in different states. I lived in Missoula, Montana, a city known for its many writers, but it was also set in a beautiful valley in the Rockies so remote that you could easily lose contact with the rest of the world. One of our editors lived in Ohio. Another lived in Chicago. And so on. We spent a lot of time on the phone.

To formalize the company I created a corporation and chose to call it Thomas J. Riggs Inc., largely because I was used to working under my own name. I adopted as our business model a web of geographically dispersed workers, each operating in a different location but brought together with specific functions—editor, writer, researcher, project editor, etc.—for our various projects. People were free to do work for other companies, and one of the things we found so appealing about the arrangement was that we felt free. We lived where we wanted and worked when we wanted. We had the power to say no if we wished to do something else. But we also had the community of the company. Some people worked with us continuously, while others would drop in and out. And our community began to spread to many talented people we met by chance or through contacts. Mariko Fujinaka, who is now our managing editor, I met while living briefly in Spokane, Washington. She began working with us in 1997.

As an interconnected web working under the name Thomas J. Riggs Inc., we developed many books, some of which, as is common in book development, do not bear our name. Two companies in particular, Gale (now part of Cengage Learning) and Chadwyck-Healey (ProQuest), became important publishing partners, and we have been grateful for our working relationship with them. Most of our work concerned literary topics, but we branched out into religion, advertising, art, and even economics.

Although the interconnected web model worked, it had a number of serious limitations, and in 2007 we began a transition, still in process, to a new system, one that would maintain some of the freedoms we enjoyed but that also brought advantages found only in a more traditional organization. Important in this transition was developing a shared workspace. Because of faster Internet speeds and new computer applications, it became possible to create a virtual office on the Internet. Built on SharePoint, Outlook, Office Communicator, and Live Meeting, our office allowed us not only to share file directories and calendars but also to talk and see each other at any time. We could share our desktops to show a colleague something or to work on the same text. In other words, we began to function virtually as if we were in the same office.

Other changes came from developments in the publishing industry, and we became aware that we needed to stay on top of new technology that was driving the future of publishing. HTML coding, HTML text editors, and text parsing became part of our daily life. Because of the simplicity of plagiarizing from the Internet and online journals, we hired an antiplagiarism company to review all our text for copied material. Perhaps most significant in academic publishing was the gradual moving away from paper and the adoption of entirely Web-based publications. Some projects we worked on could be found only on the Internet. Although much of the work we did was the same for a web content project, the loss of paper and the dominance of the Internet could sometimes be jarring to those of us who began in publishing more than twenty years ago, when PCs were novel and red pencils were more common than word processing.

Although nostalgia for tear sheets and red pencils sometimes creeps in, we embrace the changes in technology and look forward to further advancements in how information is delivered. In 2009 we began a new part of our company, literary publishing of fiction, nonfiction, essays, and poetry. Because of the development of new means of printing and distribution, we believe the economics of literary publishing, long on the decline, has the potential to rebound. And that potential, which we are eager to pursue, is thanks to technological advances.

Thomas Riggs, Owner

Additional Resources

Thomas Riggs and Company :: Home Page

Thomas Riggs and Company :: Article on 800review.com

Thomas Riggs and Company :: Listed on Betaflow.com

Thomas Riggs and Company :: Information on Incprofile.com

Thomas Riggs and Company :: Article on Review-inc.com

Thomas Riggs and Company :: Facts on 4worklife.com