Over the last few years, when we talk about trends on the domestic literary scene, it happens so that we have to talk not about books themselves but about who writes them or what kind of "new stuff" the publishers conjure up. We have seen pop figures turning into book authors (and giving work to quite a number of ghost writers by doing that), we have seen online blogs printed as books, we have seen the huge popular success of books written by people who came to the realm of fiction from business or from the glamorous celebrity world. And this last category of authors might prepare another surprise for the book industry.
Late last year, there were announcements of at least two new publishing projects, both run by people who became popular authors over the last couple of years. Oksana Robski, who broke to mass popularity in 2005 with her debut novel Casual, a supposedly true account of lives of the Russian nouveau riches, is launching her publishing company. Simultaneously, Sergei Minayev, the sales champion of 2006 with his first novel Dukhless (the word is mixed Russian-English and can be loosely translated as "soulless"), is planning to publish books in cooperation with the industry's giant AST, which puts out his own books.
The Russian literary establishment, which mostly dismissed books by Robski and Minayev as trash, is predominantly skeptical about these kinds of publishing projects. But regardless of whether you take these guys seriously as authors or not, what they could do as publishers might be different from what they write.
I haven't yet head details of Robski's project, but Minayev explained his plans quite concretely in a magazine interview a few weeks ago. Owning and running a liquor importing company himself, he intends to invest about $700,000 in putting out a couple dozen titles a year to be sold through AST's huge distribution network. And his plans about authors to bring in are more than ambitious. He hopes to take over domestic authors, such as Vladimir Sorokin, Mikhail Elizarov and, desirably but much less realistically, Victor Pelevin, as well as his favorite Western authors, including Michel Houellebecq, Kristian Kracht and Brett Easton Ellis, and, possible, discover new domestic talents.
The big question is if it is feasible, first, to take over all these authors and, second, to boost their popularity and, consequently, sales in Russia, as the aspiring publisher expects. True, many interesting authors these days - both domestic and translated - are known less than they could be as most publishers don't bother promoting titles that don't promise sales comparable to those of Harry Potter books. Titles published with the initial print run of less than 10,000 copies normally get no promotion at all, and, as a result, their sales figures never hit the 10,000 mark. So, if Minayev's cash were spent on promotion, that, coupled with AST's distribution network's capacity, could work. Well, we'll see. So far, Minayev has put out two titles, a poetry book by Andrei Orlov and a collection of short stories that originally appeared online, at the website Litprom, owned by Minayev. This stuff is of very uneven quality and cannot be a base for any sort of judgment.
Incidentally, over the last few years, there have been attempts by authors to at least edit book series at some publishing companies. Commercial fiction author Boris Akunin used to edit a detective novel series for the Inostranka publisher, while fiction and non-fiction author Ilya Stogoff still runs his own "Stogoff Project" of non-fiction books under the auspices of Amphora in St. Petersburg. But the newly announced projects are expected to be much bigger.
By Vladimir Kozlov
