Chapter 215: The Author As Publisher: Mike Sager

There is nothing new about writers hating publishers and because they are good with words even the immortals have had deliciously nasty things to say.

Like this gem from Goethe: “Publishers are all cohorts of the devil; there must be a special hell for them somewhere.”

And this one from George Bernard Shaw: “I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.”

So, you see, it’s not just you.

There are a lot of reasons why writers hate publishers. Publishers say no. They say it a lot. Publishers have a lot of reasons for saying no, mostly because they conclude that the book will not make enough money.

It is no secret that in recent years publishers have been saying no with increased frequency and as Jane Austen might have put it, alacrity. This is generally attributed to the consolidation of publishing houses into effectively five, whose corporate masters insist on the promise of a return on their investments and so tolerate a vastly diminished appetite for risk. No best seller, no contract.

If you think this only makes writers upset just talk to an editor, whose time is ever more devoted to trying to figure out what other than a book by a famous person who will spill all, will sell. I will confess that I have joked a few too many times that I should abandon my current labor-of-love-and-frustration book project and instead write something like “Swifty at 70!!; Confessions of a Late to the Game Geriatric Fan.”

At such moments it is important to step back and ask: what, exactly, does a publisher do for me?

They print my book. They have little time to edit my book. They will bind my book. They will bring it to market. And there, with little to no help in boosting sales, that book will have approximately six weeks to find an audience before being whisked off the shelves and, in short order, end up in a vast warehouse someplace in the Great Plains, where it will await the dark fate of being pulped, the literary equivalent of the equine glue factory.

And yet we long for publishers to say yes, to grant us their seal of approval, a time-honored longing that places writers – without whom, ahem, there would be no books to publish – in a decidedly subordinate position.

But lately more writers are reassessing their unhealthy relationship with publishers and asking themselves a question that brings to mind a moment I witnessed many years ago in Tokyo when A.M. Rosenthal, the legendarily mercurial editor of the New York Times poked his head in the window of a cab and, informed that the driver was off-duty, screamed (and I quote): What the fuck good are you?

Rosenthal, car-less, was left to search for another cab. Writers are discovering that they can take matters into their own hands.

My favorite example of this is Mike Sager.

Sager has been a writer for 40 years. He has written for the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, GQ and Esquire. In 2010 he won the American Society of Magazine Editors National Magazine award for profile writing. A number of his articles have been optioned for or have inspired movies and documentaries, including Boogie Nights. He has also written more than a dozen books and eBooks.

But what I most admire about Mike Sager is what he did in 2012. He founded his own publishing house, The Sager Group.

I wondered how he did it, and more importantly, why.

Sager, a writer to the core, had things to say.

Why after so many years of success as a writer did you decide to become a publisher? Was mainstream publishing leaving an opening for a new approach?

Around 2009 or 2010, I noticed that Amazon was offering four of my five Big Six (now five) books as eBooks. Though nobody from the three publishing companies involved had mentioned that the eBooks were coming, I was happy for the new revenue stream and the possibilities of electronic books.

Then I noticed that my first bestselling book, from which several movies had sprung, was not among Amazon’s list of my eBooks.

Typical writer, outraged at the apparent snub, I called my publisher in a huff.

On the call, my editor explained the royalty set up for the eBooks, was still 7.5% per book.

He also explained that in 2003, when Scary Monsters and Super Freaks was signed, there was no provision for eBook rights.

I owned the rights. Wow.

In the time it took my husband-and-wife IT team to figure out self-publishing on Amazon, the world of journalism—and particularly my field of literary journalism—and publishing in general, began circling the drain. (Back then of course, we had no inkling that the notions of fact and truth would go down with it)

After 35 years of monthly checks, there were no more for me. Freelancing was just as bad as I’d remembered in 1984. They were paying the same amount as 1984, too. And, like 1984, each new editor had some quirk that screwed up whatever masterpiece you wrote. There was obviously a need for something else.

Back in 1990, when I was with Rolling Stone, I spent a few weeks embedded with the rapper Ice Cube. He’d just split from the seminal hip-hop group NWA and was making his first record. We were hanging out by the curb, leaning on the car, catching some air, when he started preaching his economic philosophy. It was a time when musicians were learning to hold onto their own rights and make their own deals instead of relying on legions of managers. He’d figured out, he said, that he could make his art and own it and make money too. He could Harness the Means of Production, he said.

After nearly five decades of journalism, I started thinking about what Ice Cube said, a little bit of bastardized Marx perhaps, but no less salient. For all those years as a writer, I loved my job, I did well, but there was a hell of a lot of supplication and approval-seeking that went into doing it. On one side were the bosses. On the other side were the sources. I was always in the middle with my nose up someone’s butt.

With The Sager Group I could be the master of my own yes and no.

What has gone well, and what obstacles have you encountered - things for those who might want to follow your lead to know

Over 14 years we’ve published nearly 160 books. We’ve had a number of people repeat the experience with us, so maybe I’ve published 150 different authors. I treat every person as I’d like to be treated. I was a writer, of course. Still am, I suppose. Being a writer is more a state of being than anything else. I was also a professor of writing. I know a whole lot about being a person who is a writer, for better and worse. Just about anything that can happen to a writer happened to me in five decades or so. Some of it I can prevent. The rest of it I can understand, maybe even offer a word or two of comfort.

This has been the very best part of my work. My friend and publisher Morgan Entrikin of Grove Atlantic once told me, in a somewhat drunken state, he became a publisher mostly to drink with writers. I believe he meant that as an expression of fellowship, not alcoholism. Most of my work is done remotely. But the feeling is the same. I’m the old writer on the mountain, the minister, the enabler. It feels really good and as I look down the barrel of my 70^th birthday, it feels like a life. That and helping conceive the art for our covers. That’s a blast, too. And something new.

I also enjoy being able to hire people I’ve known forever. (And, as a lifelong 1099 person, I pay any fees due very quickly.) We have two former Rolling Stone copy chiefs, another from Esquire, and some super overqualified proofreaders—it’s a pleasure to do business with talented people who are known commodities . . . and because I’m not the kind of person who picks up the phone for no reason and calls people just to chat, I love that I have reason to be in touch with people. Authors and co-workers. Like always, they are my pals.

Being that technically, I’m all thumbs_­, and that I hate reading directions, everything was an obstacle in the beginning—starting with needing a password keeper; jeeze so many different websites! Luckily one of my old journalism students turned out to have a tech firm. Andrew Greenstein and some of his team of wonderful Romanian tekkies, working out of an office in Cluj in Transylvania (no shit!) helped me get everything started. Luckily, Andrew appeared one day at my door for a visit. Little did we know he would help build for me a whole new life. See what happens when you give a kid a B+ instead of an A? Andrew a friend for life.

I have to mention my Art Director, Siori Kitajima, who has been with me from the beginning at Andrew’s introduction. She is an incredible fine and graphic artist who can damn near figure out anything having to do with the web. I couldn’t do my job without all her figuring out and help and wonderful eye.

Other than the obstacles of my own personal weaknesses, with numbers and technical stuff (I am running a business!) my biggest obstacle is the ghettoization of my business by the rest of the book publishing world.

If you published 160 books over nearly 15 years, should you still be considered a “self publisher?” I am.

There is a lot of straight up prejudice from the existing book world. There is the word of indie books, which I am part of, and the world of “real books” from places like Random House and the rest.

For instance, Amazon limits the amount I can charge for an eBook to 9.99.

Or this: Kirkus Reviews has two different operations (so does Publishers Weekly). There is a publication for indies. And then there is the Grown-Up Kirkus that has all the best sellers and general trade books from large companies.

If you pay for a review from Kirkus, and your book is good enough to get a star, they will list it in the Grown-Up Kirkus.

That sort of stuff angers me. I always wonder. Is there somewhere I can go and kneel down and have someone dub me a REAL publisher?

I have a lot of real authors, that’s for sure.

Mainstream publishing measures success by units sold, by best sellers. How do you measure success?

The one thing I haven’t mentioned is that I do not earn any money for running The Sager Group LLC. Luckily, I did well enough in my writing career (through working for magazines and optioning stories to the movies, not particularly by selling books) to be able to afford to live on my retirement funds.

The Sager Group is run like a non-profit, though it is not formally so. We pay all our people and expenses and make a few thousand every year. Some authors pay a little more for our services to be featured on our shelves alongside the bestselling or Pulitzer Prize winning or merely worthy writers that I wish to publish. Many of these writers are older luminaries involved in passion projects that can no longer find a place in the Big Kid publishing world that we all came from because their businesses are failing and they can’t afford to do what they used to do.

The Sager Group publishes, but we do no marketing. That is the author’s job, as it has almost always been unless you’re lucky enough to have a company’s Big Book of the Season. Even as a mid- to lower- level writer at Big Six companies, the companies didn’t do much to market our books anyway. Ask me sometime about my second bestseller, Revenge of the Donut Boys. Following the success of my first book, Da Capo gave me $9,000 to market my book. I did a 39-stop tour on the east and west coasts and arranged everything myself, except the New York and Washington D.C. readings (bookstores in those cities are tough to crack). Several times out, I paid my own publicist.

In college I wrote my junior history thesis on utopian communities. I’ve since come to believe that while I wouldn’t want to actually LIVE with a bunch of other people, I do love the working together feeling one can have by working online with the other people who work with TSG. A lot of them have been working with me for almost 15 years. The hundreds of authors we’ve worked with often consult each other for tips.

For once in my life I am the king. I make my own rules. I’ll change one if it doesn’t suit someone. I am reasonable. I am caring. I am fair. And I make sure you always have books at your reading. (Ask me about the Decatur Festival—250 people in the big room but someone forgot to order the books.)

Writing is life. I wanted to make it pleasant.

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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture.