First off, there’s the “publishers are sheep” problem. I once saw Scott Moyer (formerly of Random House and Penguin, currently working at the Andrew Wylie Agency) on a panel talking about Shadow of the Wind and how the success of that particular book caused editors to seek out the next Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Is this really what we need? Not that Zafon’s not talented, not that I don’t think people should read his books or books like them, but I’m pretty sure that publishers love imitation more than their audience does. Medium-hopping for a second, how many Lost-esque shows came out after the immediate success of Lost? I think about a billion, none of which are still on the air. Readers like similarities, not necessarily repetition. Publishers like sure things. There may be a problem here.

Not that it’s easy for anyone — psychic or not — to identify what’s going to take off. One of the reasons imitations don’t work is because audiences tend to be fickle. Trends are trends because they aren’t permanent.

But what might be worse from a culture standpoint is if readers do come to believe that all translations are equal.

Let me digress for a minute: I’m not going to go into it too much here, but I do want to say that one of my beliefs is that publishing — or media creation of any sort—is a special sort of industry. Sure, it’s an industry based on profit and loss and catering to needs and purchasing power, but it also has a larger import. What’s published affects culture as a whole. Ideas circulate thanks to books. Visions of the world at large are crafted by what we read and see. So treating publishing as solely a money game is missing the fact that most of this are in this because we know that books have power and that we are hopefully contributing to the greater good via our jobs. Or most probably. Maybe it’s just me and I’m deluded. But still.

A while ago, I came up with the idea of the “one country, one author” problem. For example: people found out about Jose Saramago, fell in love with Blindness, and didn’t bother reading other Portuguese writers because they had already read the best. And Garcia Marquez equals Colombia. Tolstoy was Russia.

OK, that last one is debatable and maybe the whole idea is a pile of crap, but let me tell a little story about what happened to us recently. Open Letter runs a subscription series whereby for $100 you receive 10 books over the next year. After we were featured in the New York Times, hundreds, literally hundreds of people signed up, not really knowing what kind of books they’d be getting, except that they were “translations.” One of the first books sent out to these new subscribers was Ilf & Petrov’s Russian classic The Golden Calf. This book is hysterical, readable, great fun. A couple weeks after sending it out, however, I received a letter in the mail from a new subscriber asking for a full refund, since “nothing I have ever read could prepare me for this. I don’t read a lot of translations and this was nothing like The Elegance of the Hedgehog.”

The Non-Beach Reading Audience

Running parallel to the beach readers is a smaller, yet very devoted, group of literary readers. These are people who get geeked about the Man Booker Longlist. These are people who made David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet a New York Times bestseller. Who made Roberto Bolano’s 2666 a bestseller. Who made Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses a bestseller. These are the people who might read Steig Larsson, but may well crave Mathias Enard’s aforementioned Zone. These are readers who have always been around, always been on the fringes supporting the artists. This group is not half a tenth as large as publishers would like, but these are the readers who help mold literary tastes for years well into the future. And for the first time in history, it’s suddenly become much easier to reach and interact with these readers.

Everyone knows we live in a culture of mass markets. At any point in time it seems like everyone is reading the same twelve books. And this is comforting to publishers. If you can produce one of the twelve, you can capitalize on that shit. It’ll be stacked at Barnes & Noble. People will be reading it on the subway. Sure, there are those other readers who aren’t interested in these types of books, but man, they’re much harder to identify and reach. This is true, but for the readership for literature in translation to take off, I think you have to.

This is why publishing houses with strong brands — Archipelago, Europa Editions, New Directions — do better with literature than some of the major commercial houses. They may not have the distributing power, but they draw this other group of readers to them. In some ways, they’re in a better position to successfully publish a “non-commercial” translation than a Random House.

Multiple Approaches to the Readership Issue

I’m not trying to say independents are better publishers, or that we shouldn’t try and publish translated “beach books” in order to increase the audience for literature in translation — just that we need to take a multi-pronged approach to this situation.

On one hand, you have the presses identifying and marketing the hell out of translations that have the potential to become very, very popular. This is what a number of the major houses are really good at. And it makes them money and it helps them believe that there is an audience for these “foreign” books, and it leads them to publish more of these titles. All very positive.

And on the other side, you have the small presses who tend to focus on the books with a more diffuse readership. Books that “aren’t for everyone.” There’s nothing wrong with that. Some people like to rail against the culture-at-large for not appreciating this particular aesthetic. Which is kind of stupid. There is an audience for these books — it’s just up to the publisher (and any other organizations who’d like to help with money, ideas, or manpower) to find creative new ways to connect with these readers. We live in a digital age where social networks rule our time online and we’re more tuned in to one another’s lives than we’ve ever been. Whereas in the past there was that small group of readers who bonded over an obscure Grove publication, nowadays this same handful of readers can broadcast their love to similar groups across the country. And these numbers add up, and the influence these readers have can be monumental.

If different publishers, funders, reader-oriented organizations approach sides of this readership coin in different, yet equally innovative ways, (and yes, I realize that it’s sometimes really hard to distinguish what’s mass and what’s cult), some real change might come about. Hell, maybe a highly literary translation will be the beach book of summer 2011.

“What we need is a great translated beach book. Something that will appeal to tons of people and convince them that it’s safe to come in the water,” a friend said to me.

“This is true . . .” I instantly imagined someone sitting in the sand reading Zone, the 517-page, one-sentence novel that Open Letter is publishing this fall, and which has become my summer read. In my mind, this imaginary reader looked frustrated, disgusted, like she’d never read a French book again. No, like she’d never travel to France again.

OK, so anyone with a little common sense knows that our books aren’t really of the “beach read” variety. But as someone who endlessly advocates for the publication, promotion, and appreciation of international literature, this statement my friend made really got me thinking: maybe all of us promoting translations need to get more commercial. More in touch with the common reader. Maybe everyone’s right, the translations that get published here are too erudite, too specialized to survive in the marketplace.

Swiping a line from one of our board members, I’m not sure I’d be able to identify a bestseller if the damn thing sold a million copies all over my head, but there is something to the argument that a breakthrough book could help change the marketplace for literature in translation. If only it were that easy . . .

Before getting too far into theories of audience development, let’s back up a bit. I’m willing to bet everyone subscribing to Publishing Perspectives knows full well that the situation regarding literature in translation in the United States is a little bit fucked. We export the hell out of our authors, watching them get translated into dozens of languages, but we rarely publish a novel from Sweden much less Croatia, Bulgaria, Paraguay.

And we all know the two most common reasons cited for this literary isolationism: translations cost too much and don’t sell very well.

Correcting Supply vs. Creating Demand

Believing in those two premises — and these premises may well be bullshit, but let’s let that slide for another day’s editorial — has led to a large focus on correcting the supply-side of the situation, especially through translation grants designed to offset part of the publisher’s production costs. From a publisher’s perspective (no pun intended), it’s much easier to look at your balance sheet and find ways of offsetting your costs that are immediate, guaranteed, and relatively easy to acquire. And in the greater scheme of things, filling out a two-page application form and sending along a sample translation is much quicker and more reliable than trying to make a book’s budget work by identifying readers and increasing sales.

In addition to translation costs, occasionally a foreign government will also subsidize rights payments, and in very rare instances will help pay part of the printing bill. These grants are wonderful, are necessary, are the reason that certain presses stay alive. And the fact that most of these monies go to translators — one of the most woefully underpaid links in the translation publishing chain — is fantastic.

But except under very specific conditions — a book tour, a particular event — these monies are never directed at readers. Or to be more precise, at the idea of building and creating a readership.

It could be argued, or rather, I would personally argue, that by changing the demand-side of the international literature equation, the entire translation balance could be upended. If publishers believed the readership for literature in translation was equal to that for any other book they might publish, their arguments against doing these books start to fall apart. At least a little bit. And maybe more translations get published, and sell better than expected, resulting in more translations, and for once we have a positive feedback loop in relation to foreign literature.

So if the end goal is to increase readership instead of focusing on how to pay production costs, the question becomes, “how do we get people interested in these books?” And we’re back at the beach read possibility . . .

I’ve heard a number of people promote the idea that if a few translations really “took off” then we’d see an overall increase in the number of international titles making their way to our shores. Which is absolutely true. What’s the over/under on Scandinavian crime novels coming out next year that are the “next Steig Larsson”? Fifty? One hundred? I’m sure every publishing house in Manhattan would overpay by a million dollars to find the next “Girl with a something something.”

Also absolutely true that readers of Larsson will be much more willing to give another Nordic thriller a try. It’s not like international crime is an unpopular genre, but it’s pretty likely that baseline sales for the genre will spike over the next couple years.

There’s no denying that the beach read argument has validity in terms of generating a larger audience and change the minds of some publishing people. It most definitely does. And that’s great. But I think it’s just part of the picture and carries with it a few cautions and needs to be supplemented with other approaches. More on that in Part Two . . .