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Anarchy Reigns at AK Press
by Judith Rosen
Publishers Weekly, 4/28/2008
In the past few years, publishers have been looking to nontraditional
book outlets and direct sales for growth. But One Bay Area house, AK
Press in Oakland, has been mining both from the start. The 18-year-old
publisher/distributor was founded in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1990 and
opened a U.S. branch in 1994; it earns roughly one-third of its revenue
from selling direct to consumers through mail order and the Internet,
and another significant ****tion from “tabling” (at events), according to
Craig O'Hara, who handles East Coast sales and is AK's graybeard at age
37.
“We do at least one warehouse event per month and 40 out-of-town tabling
events a year,” said O'Hara. “We've been on tour with rock, punk and
political bands. We have people who sell at flea markets and on the
Internet. We go to the Los Angeles Times Book Festival, the San
Francisco Anarchist Book Fair and the Left Forum. Basically, any way we
can reach people directly, we do.” That includes a Friends of AK program
that enables its 400 subscribers to get the AK list, one or more items a
month, over the course of the year (a basic subscription is $25 per
month). AK also sells direct to activist organizations and to specialty
stores like Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse in Baltimore.
But perhaps the most unusual thing about the press, which has doubled
the number of units it sells over the past decade and grossed $1.4
million last year, is that it's organized as an anarchist collective.
Although its 10 U.S. staff members specialize in different areas --
publi****ng/editorial, distribution and sales and marketing -- each gets
an equal vote when it comes to which books, CDs or DVDs to publish.
Most of AK's 17 paperback originals a year are published in the U.S.,
titles like Chris Carlsson's Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw
Bicyclists, and Vacant-Lot Gardeners Are Inventing the Future Today! due
out in May and Alexander Cockburn's just released A Short History of
Fear. The U.K. operation, which is smaller, has only two members and
focuses primarily on distribution.
“For years,” said O'Hara, “we didn't sell to Amazon or Barnes & Noble
and Borders. Then we came to realize that as a political project, we
have to be in as many channels as possible.” The company now reaches out
to the book trade for its own list through Consortium and uses
Turnaround in the U.K. It also sells to mainstream wholesalers and
booksellers on behalf of the 100 exclusive distribution publishers
(about 40 to 50 active clients) it represents. It sells their books,
along with like-minded books from presses such as South End and New
Press through its online store (http://www.AKPress.com
), paper
catalogue and tabling.
“There's no better source for books on anarchy,” said Don Allen, general
manager of Busboys & Poets in Wa****ngton, D.C. “When we opened our store
in Virginia, we used AK Press for a high percentage of our inventory.”
Allen turns to AK for hard-to-get books from other presses and keeps
stacks of AK's three-DVD set on the Black Panthers, What We Want, What
We Believe and of AK's vegan cookbooks at both Busboys stores.
Although AK's return rate through Consortium hovers around 30%, the
return rate for AK's own clients is between 2% and 5%. In part that's
because AK is very selective, said collective member Zach Blue. He notes
that AK's margins are slim because it doesn't charge any of the fees
typically associated with distribution: for warehousing, catalogue
listings, promotions and returns.
More than half of AK's distribution clients are one-book publishers or
organizations. Its most recent addition, PM Press, founded by AK's own
founder, Ramsey Kanaan, who left the collective last fall, will have at
least a dozen items out this spring, including Derrick Jensen's How
Shall I Live My Life? “I really think PM will help lift the AK Press
distribution boat,” said O'Hara, who anticipates that it could also
raise the profile of some of AK's other publishers.
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
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