A light snowfall arrives this week on January 16, ending a 701-day ‘snow drought.’ Image – Getty iStockphoto: Mary Salen
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
‘Getting To Know That Generation of Publishers’
This evening (January 18), when Frankfurter Buchmesse president and CEO Juergen Boos leads a networking reception among publishing players in a New York City getting over its long “snow drought,” Morgan Entrekin, the publisher and CEO of Grove Atlantic, is likely to mention the role that Frankfurt Book Fair has played in the development of his career—and also about a generational perspective that his fellow publishers might consider.
Morgan Entrekin
His Frankfurt connection, he says, revolved around rights, from his earliest forays to Germany for the trade show. “And it was one of my mentors, Seymour Lawrence” who factored into Entrekin’s first Frankfurt forays.
Seymour Lawrence (1926-1994)—of Atlantic Monthly Press, Knopf, Dell, Dutton, and Houghton Mifflin during the course of his career—is remembered for cultivating the careers of Kurt Vonnegut, Katherine Anne Porter, Richard Brautigan, Pablo Neruda, Joseph Heller, and others. “And he was very successful at buying world rights,” Entrekin says he noticed, having left Simon & Schuster, himself, in 1984 to make a deal in 1985 with Atlantic Monthly Press when it was owned by Mort Zuckerman and Harry Evans.
“I had a limited amount of working capital,” Entrekin says. “And what buying and selling rights enabled me to do was leverage that working capital, amortize my risk, and build momentum around the publishing of a book,” all of which made Frankfurt “really essential for me for the first eight or 10 years.
“I can remember going to Frankfurt and doing, you know, $400,000 to $500,000 worth of business. And this was at a time when my imprint was doing $1.5 million to $2 million in a good year. So proportionately, that’s huge.”
‘To Understand the Different Markets’
Today, the result of Entrekin merging Atlantic Monthly Press with Grove Press in 1993, Entrekin is among the best known and most respected independent publishers in the States, Grove Atlantic producing 100 or more titles per year. In 2015, he opened Literary Hub, a popular consumer-facing site about books and bookish people with contributions from publishers, literary journals, booksellers, and others.
What he says was “far more interesting,” however, than the business platform, he says, “was the social and cultural side and getting to know that generation of publishers.” To this day, Entrekin says, he’s in touch with colleagues and friends with whom he’s connected because of the fact that he goes to Frankfurt.
“Those friendships were both incredibly useful professionally from all the things that I’ve learned and did learn from them, but also just personally. They’ve enriched my life so much as have many of the relationships I’ve had in publishing with authors and other American publishers and booksellers, and on and on and on.
“Because I was mainly selling rights, it was important for me to understand the different markets and of course it was most important that I understand the largest markets first because those were the ones I was going to be generating the most revenue from. I came up with a sort of loose rule” in how to get the most from some of Frankfurter Buchmesse’s biggest shows. “I came up with a rule that I would be focused on one country every year.”
This approach, he says, “gave me a slight kind of model” that gave him chances, in many cases, eventually to deepen those relationships, eventually hosting a Saturday night dinner for those who, like him, needed to break down a stand on Sunday to comply with exhibition contracts. Even long after he’d moved past his own early years at Frankfurt, Entrekin says, “I still enjoyed the dinner I’d give that would have 100 independent booksellers. That was my thing.”
The Generational Opportunity
If anything, Entrekin says, today at Frankfurt, he finds himself sometimes wondering, “Why exactly is that person coming” from a major corporate publisher “versus some energetic young editor who speaks several languages and is looking to buy translated books?
“I haven’t worked for large corporations for 40 years,” Entrekin says, but he adds that he assumes the Frankfurt trip and who in a large corporate publishing house gets to make it “has to do with hierarchy and prestige.
“But what is and could be still very valuable,” he says—something he agrees does have some presence already in Frankfurt’s several fellowship programs—”would be the younger people who are at the coalface, looking for the projects, and who have read all the books because they edited them. I wish that there was a way that that it could shift and there could be more of that.
“I’m always extremely supportive of our young people applying for the fellowship programs, and we’ve had a number of the fellowships.
“I’d hope there’s a way for corporate publishers to recognize that rather than sending the eighth senior vice-president, it’s more useful to have that 30-year-old hanging out and going into the receptions and the dinners and the bars at night and getting to know their peers from around the world.”
A rights transaction meeting in the LitAg — Literary Agents and Scouts Center — at the 2023 Frankfurter Buchmesse. Image: FBM, Anett Weirauch
More from Publishing Perspectives on independent publishing is here, more on fellowship programs in world publishing is here, and more on Frankfurter Buchmesse is here.