Sale, Sale..
So, as some of you have heard Soft Skull Press plans to be acquired by Winton Shoemaker Co. LLC—click here for the press release.
In some respects this is a sudden development, in other respects one could say this has been a long time coming. What it all means really remains to be seen. While it might seem appropriate for me to start pontificating here, the category under which I am posting this is, in fact, "Anticipatory."
This is certainly a paragraph in a key chapter in the history of American publishing, a chapter prefigured by the sale of PGW to AMS in 2003, and one that begins with the sale of Consortium to Perseus in the summer of 2006. I do not believe this chapter is over—for reasons which have to do with a difference between how PGW and Perseus account for returns, the full cash flow impact of the AMS/PGW bankruptcy will not be felt until July.
There are any number of regrets—that I was not able to keep the staff, currently Kristin Pulkkinen and Luke Gerwe is a big one, and there are other, that shall remain private—but I beg the readers of this blog to not indulge in apocalyptic thinking about independent publishing. The process of consolidation is, yes, relentless, but it is not eternal.
True, it is hard, in some respect, not to feel elegiac. As I've been preparing materials for a process known to those who buy and sell companies as "due diligence," it became clear how many people have contributed to allowing Soft Skull to publish the truly important books it has published over the years—my thanks to you now, my thanks to you eternally.
Yet Soft Skull is not over. As our wonderful author Sparrow said when he heard the news: "Soft Skull is dead. Long live Soft Skull." Soft Skull continues as an imprint. Soft Skull is not no longer independent. Had I won the lottery and bought Counterpoint from Perseus, instead of Charlie Winton buying Counterpoint and then Soft Skull, we would not have ceased to be independent.
Especially given the recent announcement by Perseus that it was closing Carroll & Graf and Thunders Mouth, it seems to me quite culturally valuable for Shoemaker/Counterpoint/Soft Skull—a group clearly embracing the imprint idea, clearly also eclectic and idiosyncratic—to be operating from a more solid financial foundation that hitherto. Allowing Soft Skull at least, to be less flakey.
I'll be blogging for a long time to come, and in the days, weeks and months to come, I promise to take some time out every so often to report on the transition, and I also promise to be as candid as possible about the process, about the ways in which things are harder, as well as the ways in which they're easier.
One little bit of hell right now is that we are seriously b-r-o-k-e for the next 6 weeks because this deal is not scheduled to close until June 30th. So, as a result, 40% off virtually everything on the Soft Skull website! Buy early, buy often! (Believe it or not, we need the ducats now far more than we did during the days of the PGW bankruptcy, this is one crazy-assed business...)