As Sarah told us yesterday, the AMS bankruptcy threatens to break small independent publishers, many of whom were counting on the revenue from their sales during the 2006 holiday shopping season to finance their operations this year. Brooklyn’s Soft Skull is one of the presses affected by the sudden loss of income, but though the operating funds are almost unbearably tight, publisher Richard Nash is determined to pull whatever strings he can to deliver his house’s big winter book on schedule next month.
That book is Jamestown, the first novel from Matthew Sharpe (left) since the runaway success of The Sleeping Father a few years back. That book, you may recall, had been rejected by twenty publishers who couldn’t bring themselves to look past the sales figures on Sharpe’s first two books before Nash acquired it for a modest advance; after Susan Isaacs selected the novel for the Today book club, all those big houses suddenly wanted to bring Sharpe back into the major publishing fold… and when Nash saw the manuscript for Jamestown, he knew he might have to compete with them for it. So he got in touch with Harvest editorial director Tina Pohlman, who made an offer for paperback rights that enabled him to keep Sharpe at Soft Skull with a larger advance than they’d ever given any author. Of course, back then, nobody anticipated that the financial collapse of AMS (and, by extension, Publishers Group West) would jeopardize the publication of anyone’s books, let alone an eagerly anticipated novel that’s already scored a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Now Nash just how to figure out how to pay for the 10,000-copy first printing he wanted for the book’s launch. “My one operational goal,” he says, “other than paying the staff, and not getting our phone shut off, is to get Jamestown published on schedule. In part because I feel I owe it to Matt, in part because I feel I owe it to independent publishing, to not make Matt’s decision look like a foolish one.”