Jennifer Nix, editor-at-large for Chelsea Green Publishing
March 2005
Declarations of Independents
How Left Coast Publishing Mavericks Are Creating Bestsellers and a New Progressive Agenda
by Deborah Nikkel
It’s high tide on Richardson Bay. To make matters worse, it hasn’t stopped raining for days. Newly ensconced in a Sausalito houseboat dubbed the “Chelsea Green Ark,” editor Jennifer Nix casts her gaze toward shore. The pier, the footpaths, the roads, the cars are knee-deep in water. Nix has a choice: stay put or find another route to the mainland. She takes about two seconds to decide. Nix commandeers a kayak, paddles to shore and goes on about her business.
Jennifer Nix is editor-at-large for Chelsea Green Publishing (www.chelseagreen.com ), a 21-year-old Vermont-based publisher dedicated to the politics and practice of sustainable living. In the wake of their bestseller, Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, by UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff, Nix has set up shop in Sausalito. The success of Lakoff’s book is one of the decade’s great independent publishing stories.
Flashback to the summer of 2004. Election rhetoric is running hot and heavy. Conservatives are framing the national debate on everything from family values to terrorism, homeland security, taxes and social security. Liberal and progressive voices are being marginalized — shut down by the chokehold the conservative media has on the public discourse.
Enter George Lakoff, Richard and Rhoda Goldman Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley and founding senior fellow at the Rockridge Institute (www.rockridgeinstitute.org ). For years, Lakoff wondered why conservatives talked so much about family values when nuclear proliferation and global warming threatened the world’s future. He set out to deconstruct their message and learn the real meaning behind phrases like tax relief, compassionate conservatism and partial-birth abortion. His insights often appeared on San Francisco-based AlterNet.org.
AlterNet executive editor Don Hazen was determined to take Lakoff’s message to a larger audience and enlisted the aid of publishing colleague Jennifer Nix. Nix saw an opportunity and convinced her boss, Chelsea Green publisher Margo Baldwin, to take on the project. But there was just one problem — the book had to come out before the election if it had any hope of influencing voters.
The team, motivated by their deep commitment to affect the election, conceived, edited, produced, published and distributed the book in just five weeks — lightning fast for the notoriously slow publishing business.
Tapping into the alternative progressive infrastructure, Nix and crew used constituency marketing to create a buzz and reach an audience eager for an explanation of what was happening in the country. Email blasts, blogs, activists and nonprofit websites — no communication venue was left untapped. In just five weeks, Lakoff’s book became a national bestseller.
Honoring its commitment to the politics and practice of sustainable living, Chelsea Green will soon come out with Start Making Sense — Turning the Lessons of Election 2004 into Smarter Progressive Politics, an AlterNet Book edited by Don Hazen and Lakshmi Chaudhry. They have also introduced a new series called “Politics of the Living,” a collection of hard-hitting works by major writers exposing the global governmental and corporate assault on life.
How ‘Hit Man’ became a Hit
Another currently hot, best-selling book midwifed by the local independent publishing scene is John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Members of what Perkins calls “the corporatocracy,” tried to dissuade him from writing the book. Undeterred, Perkins took his manuscript straight to New York, thinking a mainstream publishing conglomerate would be receptive to his expose of U.S. economic intervention in Third World countries. But when they waffled, Perkins found himself knocking on more receptive doors.
Dragonfly Media board member Richard Perl, of the Social Venture Network (www.svn.org ), got wind of the project and approached Steve Piersanti at an SVN conference and asked him to read the manuscript. Twelve years earlier, as CEO of Jossey-Bass publishing, Piersanti had experienced his own personal brush with the corporatocracy. Management consultant guru Tom Peters tells it best. “Picture this: The young CEO of a profitable, $15 million publishing house is ordered by his corporate parent to cut his workforce as part of a company-wide retrenchment. Citing sales and profit growth of 22% and 46%, respectively, he refuses... [then is] summoned to New York’s Waldorf Astoria, where his owner, the late pirate Robert Maxwell reiterates his demand. The CEO is asked to think about it over the weekend. He does, and sticks to his guns. The next day, he’s fired.”
Before the dust settled, Piersanti, urged on by a cadre of supportive authors, founded Berrett-Koehler Publishers (www.bkconnection.com) whose mission was to “focus on changing the foundational assumptions, goals, rules and structures that govern how people and organizations operate in all areas of society.”
Though Piersanti receives more than 1,000 book proposals a year — two thirds of which are recommended by friends and BK authors — he publishes only about 30 a year. But when he read Confessions, “I knew this was a book for us.” Perkins made a deal with Piersanti and then — as all BK authors are required — engaged in a rigorous writing, reviewing and editing process. One of Perkins’ reviewers, David C. Korten (BK author of When Corporations Rule the World ), “put John though the ringer” and pressed him to make the book more personal and revealing.
One of the biggest challenges independent publishers face is finding access to the market outside trade marketing channels. To launch Confessions of An Economic Hit Man, free advance copies were sent to all 350 members of San Francisco-based Social Venture Network and the members of the Novato-based Institute of Noetic Sciences (www.ions.org). Those advance copies were followed by a scatter-shot of email and free books to core thought leaders across the country. It created the buzz BK ultimately needed to take Confessions to the top.
Another important BK title — Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World is Possible 2nd Edition — has just been revised and expanded. The book, edited by bestselling authors John Cavanagh and Jerry Mander, lays out alternatives to corporate globalization. Three new chapters discuss the global balance of power, the continuing war in Iraq, the “outsourcing” of high-paying American jobs, and global media [See Mander’s”Global Media: Global Menace,” December ‘04 CG]. They also describe what ordinary citizens can do to stem the tide of corporate globalization and strengthen local communities.
Down the Beaten Track
For 52 years, City Lights Bookstore (the country’s first all paperback bookstore) has been a San Francisco landmark and a popular destination for North Beach tourists drawn by nostalgia for the Beat Generation and respect for free speech. On a good day, visitors find City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti behind the cash register or chatting about literature or politics with friends.
In 1955, the bookstore became a publisher. Its booklist is significant, profound and eclectic, ranging from Allen Ginsberg’s poetic “Howl” and Jack Kerouac’s ecstatic raps on the road to Michael Parenti’s Super Patriotism and Ward Churchill’s “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” Few independent publishers have had such an impact on American culture. Founded in 1955, with nearly 200 titles in print, City Lights publishes cutting-edge fiction, poetry, memoirs, literary translations and books on vital social and political issues. A steadfast commitment to radical democracy and progressive politics has made City Lights a beacon for activists, thinkers, and writers.
Two recent works — The Political Edge and Globalize Liberation, both edited by local activists — are further proof of the significant contribution Bay Area publishers and writers are making to progressive political discourse.
A Green Light for Social Change
December 9, 2003, was a bittersweet evening for the crowd gathered at the headquarters of Green Party mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez. The candidate was conceding the election to Gavin Newsom. Folks from all over the city had rallied behind Gonzalez and almost elected a mayor who reflected their values. But despite the defeat, there was a buzz in the air.
Nancy Peters, Ferlinghetti’s co-director of City Lights Publishers, believed that the mayoral election was something that needed to be chronicled. She broached the idea to Chris Carlsson, who had written books for City Lights in the past. Carlsson was skeptical (he chalked the outcome up more to the unique local alternative culture than to politics) Nonetheless, he agreed to take on the project. In his introduction to The Political Edge, Carlsson explains: “this book, taken as a whole, reveals a deeper politics shaping our built environment and our housing options, our sense of community and identity, how we express ourselves, how we move around, what kind of work we do and yes, how we think about representation.”
The 25 activists who contributed essays write about the failure of political representation and the electoral process, housing scams and displacement, urban ecology and transportation, the fate of the arts, insurgent subcultures, and utopian proposals for transformational politics.
In Oakland, David Solnit, a 20-year veteran of mass-action organizing, street confrontations and jails, had an idea. What if he could tap into the brain trust of activists worldwide and create a primer for modern day activists, a “book by practitioners for practitioners… making the new radicalism more explicit… [a book to] popularize the practices, understandings and experiments that are spreading across the globe.”
Solnit approached City Lights Publishers and got the green light. In Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World, Solnit weaves together the experiences and insights of community organizers, direct action movements, and global justice seekers from North America, Europe and Latin America. The book is a product of “uprisings, hard-lived victories and visions for the future” that Solnit hopes will “deepen the rebellious spirit of the new radicalism.”
The contributors — including such noteworthy activists as Walden Bello, Van Jones, Naomi Klein, Elizabeth (Betita) Martinez, George Lakey and Patrick Reinsborough — provide food for thought, tales of effective action and practical tools to create change.
Solnit writes: “If we are to move beyond old, tried-and-failed methods of attempting to create change and respond to our rapidly evolving world, it is essential that we examine the effective forms of resistance and communication and the positive alternatives that are emerging and flourishing around the world.”
It has been said that a society is only as good as its stories. If this is true, then the Bay Area’s independent publishers — in telling the important stories of our time and surfacing what others would shunt aside — have not only fed our imagination, they have also nourished our body politic and helped to emancipate our dreams.
Deborah Nikkel is a Marin-based freelancer who writes about progressive businesses and corporate social responsibility.
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