Doing everything alone on the way from the title to the bookstore.
Photo: dpa/Frank Rumpenhorst
Actually, she doesn’t feel like talking about her publishing house anymore, says Nikola Richter with a laugh. She is standing in front of the main entrance of an old factory building in Neukölln. Several creative agencies and freelancers have joined forces here. Richter would much rather talk about the books she publishes in her one-woman publishing house mikrotext.
The microtext books are small and compact. They fit comfortably on an outstretched hand and thus in the larger jacket and coat pockets. The office of microtext is on the 3rd floor of the building and leads off a wide hallway in which there is a racing bike and posters hanging. The office itself has a relaxed working atmosphere. An editor, with whom the publisher shares a room, is wrapped in a blanket and is typing on his laptop. It looks like a shared kitchen. Tea and coffee are on the shelf next to a kettle. There is concentrated abundance on the desk.
Self-esteem is important when laying, Nikola Richter explains later on a walk along the nearby canal. You have to be convinced that you have timeless, good titles in your program. Books worth reading. Such as »The Whole Story« by Abou Saeed, who, as a Facebook writer, describes everyday life in Syria and Germany and now lives in Berlin. Or Rasha Abba’s short stories A Summary of All That Was. In February, the short story collection, which deals with the search for identity and stability, was staged at the Gorki Theater.
Publishers have a great responsibility. What do they choose, what eventually ends up on the (digital) sales table and what disappears in the drawers? Which book might make it onto the stage or television? She makes the decisions intuitively, and the program is then, in principle, accessible retrospectively, explains the publisher of mikrotext.
Richter thinks and speaks quickly. She walks briskly, paying close attention to what is going on around her. Ideas flow out of her as if there were a never-ending source somewhere. Her misplaced texts combine new narratives both in terms of content and aesthetics. Many of the works were often created on the Internet, she says. This opened the door to the book market for completely unknown authors. On the Internet, the classic »gatekeepers« are often omitted. Anyone can publish without wandering through editing and proofreading or being mediated by agencies. This has advantages and disadvantages, but unknown authors are at least not sorted out immediately.
At mikrotext, the 46-year-old publisher maintains contacts, looks around the current author market, selects and does everything herself, from sales to press work. Large publishers often work with many different departments and agencies that hire new authors suggest. But the choice is large and the competitive pressure in times of paper shortage and inflation is even tougher. It is becoming increasingly difficult for authors to find a publisher outside of the mainstream and the well-known bestseller lists, according to publishing circles behind closed doors.
Very few houses currently dare to do anything really new. Penguin Random House is currently the world’s largest publishing house and is now responsible for a quarter of all book publications. Since the merger and acquisition of market shares of the Pearson publishing and media group in 2020, Penguin Random is now majority owned by the German media group Bertelsmann. More than 300 individual publishers are now bustling around the world under the umbrella of Penguin Random House. These are completely different sizes than independent (small) publishers.
Yasemin Altıney also thought politically with her publishing house Literarische Diverse in 2019, when she wanted to create a space for marginalized voices that otherwise tend to get lost in the broad masses of the literary scene. Last year, a first volume of poetry by Olaide Franke was published, which deals with the reality experiences of a black woman.
Altıney was one of the winners of the Cultural and Creative Pilots award in 2021. Despite this support, the publisher keeps coming up against structural limits, she says. Publishing house suppliers do not always get back to you, and it is almost impossible to manage sales alone. The fight against the established system is consuming. Her one-room apartment in the east of Berlin is supposed to be a place of retreat, but in the first two years since the publishing house was founded it was primarily an editorial office and a warehouse at the same time. The magazines were stacked on the narrow bookcase next to the sofa, and Altıney packed orders himself. In the spring of 2022, that was no longer possible. She has given up storage and shipping to a family business.
“I didn’t go into the project with the aim of becoming super popular and making a profit from it,” explains Altıney. She thinks it over, takes her time with the answers and then adds: “It’s my one-woman advantage that I don’t have a big publisher on my hands.” She doesn’t have to discuss her ideas with 20 departments first. “I’m more flexible and can make spontaneous decisions.” So if there are current developments, she can react to them directly and adjust the topic of the next magazine issue accordingly. This is how the topic of the third edition of Literary Diverse entitled »Resistance« came about because in August 2020 some right-wing extremists and lateral thinkers tried to storm the Reichstag. The edition of 1500 copies is sold out.
In 2021, almost 64,000 books were published in Germany, slightly fewer than the year before. Sales figures have been falling since May of this year because of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine and the associated supply bottlenecks for wood, including paper, and rising inflation. But the sales figures of the online book trade have been growing steadily since the pandemic. More and more people are buying digitally. For small, independent publishers, sales via online shops on websites and via social media as well as book fairs large and small are particularly important.
»My project probably wouldn’t have been possible without social media, or it would have taken much longer to establish myself. It would also be much more expensive financially,” Altıney is certain. In the beginning she wandered around the city alone and put up posters. But she quickly dismissed that. The effort was too great.
The excitement when the big book fairs are canceled shows how important the big fairs are for publishers and authors. Because these are the place of networking and advertising. Trade fairs are often sponsored by the city and state. Losses caused by the pandemic, for example, were compensated for with the help of a federal and state protection program. In the Corona year 2021, there were four million euros from the economic stimulus program “Neustart Kultur”.
At the beginning of February, the Leipzig Book Fair announced that it had to cancel this year’s fair again “with a heavy heart”. According to the company, the reason was the many previous cancellations by various exhibitors, as there were staff shortages due to the Omicron variant of the corona virus. The press spokeswoman for the Leipzig Book Fair explained that there had been cancellations from all areas, and not only large but also small publishers had refrained from participating. However, it was striking that the trade fair was canceled one day after the Holtzbrinck Group canceled it. At the time, Nikola Richter explained that small publishers and their authors were often not considered when it came to these large-scale concepts. Without further ado, she organized a digital book fair reception, which she advertised on her mikrotext Instagram channel.
Not only the publisher of mikrotext tried to react according to the circumstances. Other smaller and larger independent publishers didn’t give up either and created an alternative pop-up fair on the Werk 2 site in Leipzig at the end of March. The former industrial area between old brick walls, today a place for concerts and exhibitions, was the perfect place for all book lovers to meet beyond the typical major events. It was also an act of self-empowerment. How and whether the larger Frankfurt Book Fair will take place in mid-October remains to be seen. In the spring, the scene proved that publishers and authors could organize themselves very spontaneously on their own.
In the end, the readers make the difference. The small bookshops far away from the big bookstore chains live from and with the suggestions and inquiries of the customers. There are often personal relationships between dealers, buyers and authors. In addition, private bookstores are often in close contact with the publishers and can align themselves individually by working with small publishers. Where chains rely on a large selection of classic genres such as crime fiction, popular non-fiction and travel books and also work off bestseller lists, there is hardly any room for more diverse voices. As multipliers, the private bookstores are also indispensable for small, independent publishers.
