Jenny Shank‘s a Sherman Alexie (left) fan, but she wasn’t impressed with his latest, a paperback original from the Black Cat wing of Grove Atlantic called Flight. The novel “has an ambitious premise but lacks ambition in its execution,” she wrote in the Rocky Mountain News. “Flight is disappointing, and the signs are that the publisher knew it—why else would a novel by such a major writer be brought out as a paperback original?”
Of course, paperback originals are just the way Black Cat rolls, and if the authors it’s published since its relaunch nearly three years ago have all been, shall we say, less established than Alexie, well, there’s a reason he chose this path. “It was shocking to me that someone with very little experience in publishing like Jenny Shank would even have a guess at that,” he told another Boulder newspaper. “The arrogance was astonishing.” He went on to explain his rationale further
“There are so many returns of hardcovers that it’s an economic model that’s broken for most writers. So I did this to try to remove some of the stigma… I took a lower advance, and we published in paperback to send a message: This is the way [writers] are going to be more successful. It’s also the way more first-time and experimental writers will get published.”
The cynical among you will be forgiven for saying to yourself, oh, yes, I’m so sure his agent came back to him enthused about the opportunity to send a message about the viability of trade paperback originals. For that matter, you may wonder how much stigma still clings to TPOs when Black Cat can get Man Gone Down on the front page of the NYTBR, and Vintage can repeat the good fortune with Remainder three weeks later—but statements like Shanks’ demonstrate that not all consumers have gotten the memo yet. As for Shanks, she’d take the mulligan if she could, but she notes that Flight still has a blurb from her earlier reviews of Alexie’s work—with her name taken off.