Feminist publishers and booksellers have been at the forefront of the movement to make women's voices heard since the 1970s, and both are falling prey to corporate predators in book publishing and bookselling. Independent booksellers are failing at alarming rates, and many feminist book publishers are falling by the wayside. Some have stopped publication entirely, such as Third Side Press in Chicago and gynergy books in Prince Edward Island, Canada. Firebrand, one of the leading feminist publishers, has sold their list to their distributor LPC Group. Some are simply reducing or even stopping publication of new titles; e.g., Naiad is down to four new books a year .

To get the perspective from feminist publishers, we contacted several for interviews. Responding were Beth Dingman of New Victoria Publishers in Norwich, Vermont; Margarita Donnelly of Calyx Books in Corvallis, Oregon; and Susan Hawthorne of Spinifex Press in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

These three presses publish very different kinds of work, and have different funding practices. Calyx is a non-profit supported in part by grants, donations, and volunteer work. New Victoria, also a non-profit corporation, is also one of the few U.S. publishers still supported by the books they sell (others are Cleis, Seal, and Naiad). New Victoria had a half dozen new titles in 2000, and has a long list of lesbian mysteries, including the work of Sarah Dreher, as well as poetry by Tee A. Corinne, essays by Leslea Newman, and Barbie Unbound, a parody honoring Barbie' s 40th birthday. Calyx, originally founded in 1976 to publish a journal, has been publishing books since 1986, and now has 30 titles in print. Calyx has won many awards, including the American Book Award for The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women’s Anthology.  Spinifex is a thriving Australian press with many international authors and about 100 titles published since they began in 1991. While Australia has had many small feminist presses, Spinifex is presently the only one actively publishing.

Beth Dingman, of New Victoria, describes the relationship of feminist publishers to feminist booksellers, and the problems they face, like this:

"Independent women's bookstores were our major outlet for lesbian / feminist books. For years, of course, they were the only outlet, but then the big stores caught on and realized there was a market so began stocking them. Large corporations have big bucks and so could afford to offer discounted books. This drove many feminist bookstores out of business. This has had a huge effect on us. Although Barnes & Noble and Borders sometimes stock our books, they are not prominently displayed, and their clerks aren't familiar with our books the way feminist booksellers were. So mostly the books just sit on the shelves in some far corner of the store and then get returned. Feminist bookstores kept books around for a year or two, and seldom returned books to the publisher. We used to average about a 7% to 10% return rate. Large bookstores return automatically after six weeks, and we now have a return rate of around 30-40%."

Margarita Donnelly at Calyx reports return rates approaching 50%, combined with a drop in sales near 40%. She points out that an important mission of feminist publishers has been in developing authors who would not be published by mainstream presses. First books don't sell well without either huge marketing campaigns or knowledgeable booksellers to promote the books. Thus feminist booksellers have played a crucial role in helping to promote unknown authors. In superstores, Donnelly says, publishers have to pay to get good placement, and small presses just can't afford that. Without big promotion budgets and with far fewer feminist booksellers, presses like Calyx have had to cut positions, reduce the number of books they publish, and spend more time fundraising to subsidize the books they do publish.

Susan Hawthorne reports similar events in Australia. In the last two to three years, many small Australian presses have ceased publication, and Australian independent booksellers are failing too with the introduction of Borders (Whitcoulls in New Zealand). New taxes and laws in Australia and New Zealand have also made things difficult for small publishers

Beth Dingman speculates that the new generation of feminist readers may also affect the downturn in sales. Most feminist presses were founded in the 1970s and 80s by second wave feminists whose interests were different from the young women of today. These older feminists, who worked hard to pave the way, find it hard to recommend this poorly paid business to younger women, "many of whom seem to have different interests, anyway, such as fashion and celebrities--at least that is the impression one gets from reading national gay and lesbian magazines like Out and Girlfriends."

Technology is changing things, too. Some say we should look to non-print ways of making our voices heard and that the internet is the bookstore of the future. Yet the same predatory bookselling practices exist online. Amazon.com undercuts prices and has been accused of unethical practices, such as discontinuing their privacy policy.

Susan Hawthorne attributes some of Spinifex's success to keeping up with technological changes. Spinifex has been on the web since 1995 and has an elaborate website, though without a fully functional, "secure," online ordering system. Instead, they encourage buying from local, independent feminist bookstores, but provide a link to Amazon.com, which has become their single biggest sales outlet. While Hawthorne agrees with the complaints against Amazon.com and other mega.com booksellers, she says they can't afford not to sell through Amazon.com. The Australian book market is too small to support feminist publishers on its own, so they rely on international sales, especially to the U.S. market, and Amazon.com provides that link.

The New Victoria website does offer secure online sales, plus a 20% discount for online sales. This seems to be a response to Amazon.com, which lists 116 New Victoria titles, many at 10-20% off and accompanied by positive customer reviews. In response to a question about feminist authors relying on Amazon.com for distribution, Beth Dingman points out that Amazon.com doesn't need lesbian authors and provides unfair competition with feminist bookstores. She writes, "Just don't expect Amazon.com to replace the feminist bookstores as one of the foundations of lesbian/feminist culture."

Calyx does not offer online sales but is working on a new website and has set up a committee to study their audience and the future of their publications. "We need to develop more publications accessible on the internet for download," writes Margarita Donnelly, "as well as better marketing through the web and email to college professors for course use of our publications. We don't have to have a large market to sell enough to survive. We need to reach out better in the new media and reach out through that new media to our potential readers and audience in new ways, and we need to study what those should be." Donnelly points out that while the internet is helpful, "it is also confusing, and without large marketing budgets it is no easier to have a presence on the internet than in superstores."

In response to the question about the move toward non-print media, Susan Hawthorne writes that "we can save some trees by not printing on paper the kind of books which are intended to have a very short shelflife -- manuals, annuals, and the like -- or those which have very short print runs, e.g., scholarly journals and monographs. I think there is an awful lot of wasteful printing (and publishing) going on, so perhaps some of that could shift. Having said all this, I think that poetry, literary fiction and really good non-fiction will continue to have a place as printed books. The tangibility of it is a factor, and I think they will become luxury items, something to gourmet read. I hope that feminist books can make it into this category."

Margarita Donnelly agrees that the internet does not supply a simple answer to the future of publishing. "Complex ideas need time and thought to reach their audience," she writes. "The internet is not such a well-developed or thoughtful area yet. So I believe the future may hold solutions we have not yet discovered to keep women's literature and ideas well and burgeoning."

If you would like to publish a response to this article, or an article on a similar subject, contact Rose Norman at NormanR@uah.edu.

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