When I first started talking to Kevin Sampsell about his involvement in the anthology Portland Noir we were walking downtown the few blocks from Kenny and Zukes, over to Powell’s Books, Kevin’s home for the past eleven years. When I finally asked Kevin about how he became the editor for Portland Noir he said, “Well I kind of got talked into it.”
Johnny Temple, Publisher of Akashic Books, approached Kevin because he has collected a body of work that features short stories online and in print, a previously edited anthology and a network of writers from his years at Powell’s. Even though there was someone else that wanted to edit Portland Noir, Johnny Temple wanted Kevin Sampsell.
Johnny Temple, Publisher of Akashic Books, approached Kevin because he has collected a body of work that features short stories online and in print, a previously edited anthology and a network of writers from his years at Powell’s. Even though there was someone else that wanted to edit Portland Noir, Johnny Temple wanted Kevin Sampsell.
Kevin Sampsell’s career isn’t what most people think about when they see an author with a debut memoir out in paperback. Most people just think they sat down and wrote a book, working on it for years, submitted it to an agent and then got published. More and more in the new world of publishing though, Kevin’s path to a debut book is becoming normal. Kevin published many short stories in literary journals and online entities like McSweeney’s. Along the way, Kevin was the editor of Insomniac Reader, a short story anthology that featured the likes of Rick Moody and Jonathan Ames, but all the while Kevin has worked at Powell’s being a book buyer and at one time an event coordinator where he did what all writers need to do in the new publishing age, and especially people that want to edit short story anthologies: network.
“I owe most of my success to the relationships I built at Powell’s,” Kevin said.
Kevin Sampsell’s career is the perfect example of how to be a successful anthology editor. When he went to publish Insomniac Reader he had an agent. She shopped the book around to all the large publishers, the ones that give big advances and have huge nation wide distributors. He had the names that you would think could make an anthology marketable, but no one was taking it. Short story anthologies don’t make money his agent was told over and over.
Dan DeWeese, local short story writer, editor of Propeller Magazine and author of the forth coming book You Don’t Love This Man, says that the reason large publishing houses say that they don’t make money is because, “if you have an office or whole building that houses a large staff of editors and office support people, a short story collection is not going to make enough money to cover that overhead. A story collection that sells 10,000 copies would be considered a great success in the short-story-collection market, but wouldn't actually net enough money to even come near keeping a big publisher's building and staff in business.”
Although Dan believes that a short story anthology is more marketable than a short story collection, “with an anthology, you can rely on a certain number of people who know each contributor as being potential buyers. And anthologies are usually themed, so you can hope that the theme appeals to a general audience in some way. A short story collection is all one person, so the dynamic is different.”
Kevin eventually found Manic D, a small press out of San Francisco, to publish the book even though his agent didn’t do much work to get it to the small press. Kevin didn’t talk about his former agent bitterly. He said it was just one of those things. Agents don’t want to spend time sending your book around to small presses when their fifteen percent cut is of a five hundred dollar advance, which was, in the end, what Kevin as editor of Insomniac Reader was paid. Kevin wasn’t the only one not getting paid a large sum, Manic D offered to pay contributors twenty five dollars and a copy of the book. When I asked Kevin if this was a problem, he said that at first he thought it would be. Kevin had collected big names in his book and wanted to pay the likes Rick Moody and Dave Eggars, who was involved at the time. He said that none of the writers had a problem with it.
That’s the great thing about writers. We’re not in it for the money.
The only problem Kevin had, he said, was using previously published pieces. Manic D thought that pieces that have been widely read bring down the marketability of a short story anthology. The only anthologies that seem to be able to get away with it are the Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Anthology and the yearly Norton anthology, but these anthologies also work off of prestige and the University system that puts them on English literature book lists.
Kevin’s advice for anyone that wanted to edit an anthology was to get all original stories. Insomniac Reader had to drop some stories because they had been previously published in places that were too widely read. He said that in general you can use stories that have been published in literary journals but nothing that’s been published in places like The New Yorker.
All of this was a learning process for Kevin. He was building his platform and publishing. Editing the Insomniac Reader and being a guest editor for Pitchfork all gave Kevin Sampsell his street cred as the kids these days say. These were all part of the reasons that Johnny Temple talking him into editing Portland Noir, an anthology that was everything that people who enjoy to edit want in a short story anthology. The publisher had a built in distribution, a marketing plan(Akashic has almost forty published Noir books featuring different cities) would pay contributors two hundred dollars and had a contract with Kevin for royalties on the anthology. In short, people would read it, and both the contributors and the editor would make some money. The best part of the anthology itself was that Kevin had a contract, so it was guaranteed that if a contributor’s story was accepted it would be published. It’s much easier to get writers to write original pieces specifically for the anthology if they know that they’ll get paid and published. So even though Kevin was talked into editing Portland Noir, it was the ideal job for a short story anthology editor.
Kevin’s path to publishing an anthology isn’t the only path. Ariel Gore, local writer, and editor of the zine Hip Mama, decided to put the anthology Portland Queer together because, “the queer voices in Portland so often seem to me simultaneously intrinsic and outsider. And there’s something compelling in that contradiction.” Ariel has been part of the Portland writing scene for years, so she sent out requests for submissions to authors she knew, spreading the word that she was putting together an anthology about Portland’s gay community. Gore didn’t get her book published through a small or big press, she just published herself, under her own press: Lit Star Press. She put together events, gave it to book stores like Powell’s and Broadway Books to sell,(hosting events at both stores) had it for sale on Amazon and her own website. She did exactly like her book How to Become a Famous Writer Before You Die says: She put herself out there and marketed herself. Ariel is her own literary star because she says so.
Both Ariel with Portland Queer and Kevin with Insomniac Reader had something they wanted to do. An idea that came together in their brains and they decided to do it because they wanted to. Deciding to put together a short story anthology is much like deciding to be a writer itself: if you don’t have to do it, if there isn’t something inside you that makes you keep putting in the hours, then don’t do it at all.
When it comes to the actual process of putting together a short story anthology, I asked Paul Collins, a non-fiction writer and editor of the Paul Collins Library, a McSweeney’s publication, advice on getting a short story anthology published because not everyone can have Kevin’s ideal situation of someone approaching you with a theme and a contract for an anthology. Collins said that the first and most important thing for selling and getting authors for your anthology was that, “You need a strong central concept for an anthology. This kind of comes back to the ‘write your book jacket first’…not being able to truly nail down the name, concept and tone of the jacket sinks many unready book ideas.” This concept for Paul was so important that he not only said it once, but twice. It’s not only important to have it in order to get your book published, but to have to present to authors and get the kind of submissions you want.
When I asked Paul about getting authors for the book he said, “You don't necessarily need 22 big names. That's a tall order. But you probably would want at least a few of them to be recognizable, a few respected and semi-recognizable, and a few can be promising ones that nobody's heard of.”
There is also the problem that authors are busy people. Authors spend hours, days, months and years working on novels and writing a fresh piece on spec for an editor that doesn’t have a contract in place from a publisher can be the last thing they want to do. Paul had the advice, “you'll encounter less resistance (especially from the pros) on asking to use previously published pieces -- ie stuff that's run in a magazine, but maybe not appeared in a book. In other words, you're not asking them to write a new piece on spec, you're just asking if you can use (and eventually pay for, if you get the contract etc etc) a piece that they already have just sitting around. The writer doesn't have to make any additional effort in that case, so the fact that they don't know you & don't know if it'll actually happen won't bother them as much.”
In talking to Kevin Sampsell I decided that going through an agent for a short story anthology wasn’t a path but Paul Collins did offer this advice on someone that was trying to sell an anthology to an agent, “You don't need to have a completed anthology together, necessarily, before going to an agent, but I'd say that you do need to have a proposal ready -- namely, the concept and the prospective authors…when you go to the agent you can say, ‘X, Y, and Z are willing to contribute pieces, and I plan on asking A, B, and C.”
Although Collins believed that you could have an anthology not completely together before selling it, in talking to local writer Margaret Malone, winner of the 2009 Oregon Literary Fellowship, who attended AWP(The Association of Writing and Writing Programs) and the panel “A Pen Behind Your Ear: Gathering, Editing, Publishing, Marketing and Promoting an Anthology” the moderators said that having a full anthology completed, like you would a novel, was the way to go. Kevin Sampsell did this same thing for the Insomniac Reader. You put together the anthology like you were writing a book, and then go to sell it. Just like a novel, you find out who in the past has published an anthology like yours, and then send your manuscript with a great query letter to that publisher. Just like anything in the publishing world, it takes research, hard time and work.
There is also the problem that authors are busy people. Authors spend hours, days, months and years working on novels and writing a fresh piece on spec for an editor that doesn’t have a contract in place from a publisher can be the last thing they want to do. Paul had the advice, “you'll encounter less resistance (especially from the pros) on asking to use previously published pieces -- ie stuff that's run in a magazine, but maybe not appeared in a book. In other words, you're not asking them to write a new piece on spec, you're just asking if you can use (and eventually pay for, if you get the contract etc etc) a piece that they already have just sitting around. The writer doesn't have to make any additional effort in that case, so the fact that they don't know you & don't know if it'll actually happen won't bother them as much.”
In talking to Kevin Sampsell I decided that going through an agent for a short story anthology wasn’t a path but Paul Collins did offer this advice on someone that was trying to sell an anthology to an agent, “You don't need to have a completed anthology together, necessarily, before going to an agent, but I'd say that you do need to have a proposal ready -- namely, the concept and the prospective authors…when you go to the agent you can say, ‘X, Y, and Z are willing to contribute pieces, and I plan on asking A, B, and C.”
Although Collins believed that you could have an anthology not completely together before selling it, in talking to local writer Margaret Malone, winner of the 2009 Oregon Literary Fellowship, who attended AWP(The Association of Writing and Writing Programs) and the panel “A Pen Behind Your Ear: Gathering, Editing, Publishing, Marketing and Promoting an Anthology” the moderators said that having a full anthology completed, like you would a novel, was the way to go. Kevin Sampsell did this same thing for the Insomniac Reader. You put together the anthology like you were writing a book, and then go to sell it. Just like a novel, you find out who in the past has published an anthology like yours, and then send your manuscript with a great query letter to that publisher. Just like anything in the publishing world, it takes research, hard time and work.
The short story anthology like the novel, like the literary journal, like the short story collection, is not dead. Although it feels closed in at times with only big name authors coming out with short story collections after years of work, or the only anthologies ever published are the same ones year after year, there is still a market for your own anthology if you choose to edit one. There may not be a huge advance out there or even a large publisher that will publish your anthology, but there is a home for your book in small presses like Manic D who published Kevin’s anthology or your own press like Ariel Gore did with Lit Star Press. In the end that’s what all writers want, a home for their stories and maybe like Kevin Sampsell you’ll get five hundred dollars and your contributors will only get twenty five and a copy of the book, but your name will be in print, and the platform of your writing career will have another piece of scaffolding. Then one day, maybe, you’ll be like Kevin and get talked into editing a book even though you’re working on your book in progress, trying to get it published. This time however, you get to pay contributors, and you don’t get an advance, but you receive royalties once the publisher recovers it’s cost, more than usual in fact. You get to split profits down the middle with the publishing company. For a successful book, such as Hair Styles of the Damned, (Akashic 2004) which sold 70,000 copies, you could earn around 100,000 dollars is what Kevin was told by Akashic. Portland Noir has been a best seller at Powell’s Books since it’s debut on May 1st, 2009, and when we were sitting there over coffee and pastries, in the book store where Kevin has kept his day job, he kind of smiled a bit at the idea of his royalty check coming in the mail, like he knew that all his hard work that summer would finally be paying off.
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