Publishing is as gamy as the record biz. To say it's a mess is like calling the sky blue.
The reasons could fill the Manhattan phone book. Books slated for publishing never get published. Those that do disappear with the trash. Marketing campaigns by publishing houses top out at pathetic.
Jim Bildner recalls an editor-in-chief of a sizable house who told him the time spent considering a book in a new list is about one minute.
"Even well-known authors say that after their book is published they feel abandoned," Bildner said.
(But then authors always feel abandoned. They're neurotic.)
A couple of years ago, Bildner started a nonprofit foundation called the Literary Ventures Fund - the only one of its kind in the country, he says - that invests in promising books and helps bring them to print. With luck, they rack up decent sales and provide Bildner some return.
Today, it's about as easy for an author to get a book published as it is to win the lottery. "The publishing ecosphere is ginned up against a good author getting published," says Bildner. "I want to level the playing field."
What LVF does is work with publishers to push a book it finds worthy.
It draws up a marketing plan that includes promotion strategy for new and old ones alike. It may hire a publicist, it targets book clubs, interested groups and social networks like MySpace and Facebook.
As gambits go, LVF is admirable and quixotic. Its future is anyone's guess. It can survive on peanuts because it's a foundation and employees work for peanuts and their love of books. (How long that will last remains to be seen.) It is not a bank, and it doesn't make grants.
LVF kicked up some dust in 2005 when it announced its creation, but it was a mere concept at the time. It has a track record now, and it's encouraging. LVF has helped publish or repackage 11 books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in the past 18 months. All have made some money for the Bildner operation, still a speck of a thing with four employees, including himself, split between New York and Boston.
(Truth in advertising: I'm a friend of Ande Zellman, a former editor of the Globe magazine, who is LVF editorial director.)
Bildner is the same James Bildner who, in a quick run in the '80s, had a meteoric rise and a breathtaking swan dive with his J. Bildner & Sons.
The Boston-based, high-end yuppie food chain was, at its start, hotter than high school love, as Texan Jim Hightower used to say about political campaigns. But it overexpanded and by the end was deemed "a spectacular small-business failure" by the Wall Street Journal.
Bildner then worked peripatetically in enterprises on both coasts. Everything shattered when in December 2005, his son Peter died of a heroin overdose at 21. He and his wife, Nancy, absorbed unimaginable grief and then decided to change their lives. Bildner would no longer make money. He would give it away.
Despite his business failure, he has gobs of it. He is now a small-bore philanthropist with the DNA of a venture capitalist. He provides seed money to a bunch of things he cares about, including the Addiction Recovery Management Service at the Massachusetts General Hospital.
The education of Jim Bildner in the book biz has been a doozy. "The largest and smallest houses have the same gap for different reasons," he notes. "The whole industry is under-capitalized and under-resourced. It doesn't matter if you have 70 or 700 titles."
He also learned that a key player in the game is the distributor. Small presses in particular are "totally captive" to the distributors, he says, who take books to the booksellers. Adds Zellman, "They're one of the great hidden powers in all this."
My favorite LVF story is about "Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife" a first novel by a man in his 60s named Sam Savage who, as Zellman tells it, looks like Rip Van Winkle.
A small outfit called the Coffee House Press approached LVF looking for help with "Firmin." "They said, 'We've never been so excited by a book,' " says Zellman. "I was hooked on the first page."
Firmin, it turns out, is a rat who lives in a bookstore near Boston's late lamented Scollay Square modeled after George Gloss's legendary Brattle Book Shop there.
LVF invested in Coffee House Press to increase the book's press run. ("Firmin" has always been paperback.) It entered the book in Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program and ended up a finalist in its 2006 Discover awards. LVF pushed it through its industry contacts, and had Savage write personal thank-you notes to booksellers who had supported the book, which drew yet more orders.
A Spanish publisher bought the world rights to "Firmin," and it became a paperback bestseller in Spain. It has sold well over 35,000 copies so far - a huge number for a neophyte.
LVF may never be a mouse that roars. It may just scurry around finding cheese that no one else smells. That's fine too. But so far, so sweet.
"Everywhere we went, they said, 'No, this can't happen,' " Bildner recalls about the early days. "Well, it has happened across every line."
Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com
