To my right was a group giving out free copies of the Koran, to the left a man who had set up a booth selling his book about martial arts.
What is the best new writing?
A middle-aged man had approached the booth, smirking at his own irony.
I found in the first hour of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, that there were three types of customers: one, a dyed-in-the-wool Granta lover; two, an aspiring writer; and three, someone who was neither but wanted me to work for a nonexistent sale. He was one of those.
All day, combinations of the above strolled by the booth. Students, parents, writers I knew, others I did not. I chatted, I spoke of themes. I had come to Los Angeles hoping to say in a small way the magazine was coming back—instead I appeared to have dragged a corpse to the sunshine.
Granta, I thought you guys had closed?
Granta, didn’t you do an issue on death? Man, after that, I was like, that’s it.
*
There is nothing harder than selling what you believe should be of self-evident value. This is especially true of being a small magazine, a small literary magazine interested in the writing of the world. The efforts you make to sell feel forced and inauthentic—they lack a certain dignity.
I spent two days in the Los Angeles sunshine back in April 2009, observing this dynamic. I didn’t know it then, but by the month’s end I’d simply no longer be the American editor, after the publisher parted ways with the magazine’s head for the second time in eighteen months.
Tiring as this booth work was, I was glad to have had a few of these experiences. Like many who had grown up with it, I thought Granta would forever be a force within the cultural life of writing from or translated into the English language. I had discovered in its pages innumerable writers: from Svetlana Alexievich to Ben Okri to Rachel Cusk and Kazuo Ishiguro. Chris Offutt and Pat Barker. For a long time, whenever I saw the name Granta or heard it spoken, a grainy image immediately popped into my mind: it was vague, but if I had to describe it I might say it was a rainy North London street; a hangover would be involved; a book open and in its pages something in the world worth recording and exploring, the story told dispassionately but truthfully without the muscular stylized I-was-there-too-reader fanfare of so much American reportage.
I could sign on to some of that—without the implied idea of a center.
I found a very different story in Los Angeles and New York, though, in Oxford, Mississippi; Columbus, Ohio; and Boston, Massachusetts. These were the places I visited on the road when I first began work at Granta. People who had read the magazine were not sure it was still being published; those who read it religiously were in their sixties; anyone in their twenties who knew it existed felt it more as a node of reputation, not as an actual living thing; almost no one who submitted to it from America read the actual current magazine, and in truth, I could hardly blame them.
The magazine I’d come to in 2008 was like a museum with limited visiting hours. Granta had made a name in the eighties and nineties finding new writers from across the globe, as well as leading British storytellers of their generations. Their names made for spectacular subscription ad copy. García Márquez. Lessing. Rushdie, Winterson, Barnes, McEwan, Tremain, Okri, Ishiguro. In truth, though, most of them had not contributed a piece in years. And the American readers who bolstered the journal’s sales in the swinging eighties and early nineties had long since been forgotten. And the readers and writers from everywhere else? They were largely treated as elsewhere too.
Worse, the magazine had enshrined its once original gestures—of witnessing and using the self as an optic, of doing this with a very English sense of self-deprecation, as if irony and bitter humor were the best way to signify regret for the Empire—into a low-simmering, end-of-empire chippiness. After thirty-five years under an American and a Scot, and then briefly two editors from England, the magazine—once the property of an English university—had returned to being an official English publication, even if it was now owned by a Swede.
Sigrid Rausing’s purchase of the magazine had saved it from possible death—or near death through acquisition by another, bigger publishing house. And this had been a great thing. Inside the magazine, though, it had unleashed a sense of entitlement. Granta had been moved from its cigarette-scarred North London digs in Noel’s Yard into a renovated public house in Holland Park where a high-end architecture firm belonged. Fresh flowers were brought in every week at astonishing cost. The building was cleaned nightly. Meantime, subscriptions were in free fall.
I say this now not to tell tales out of school, to speak against my predecessors or pull down the pants of a grand old institution and rap it sternly on its little bum with a ruler, and laugh, but to give you a sense of context for some of the ideas I’m going to float here about publishing and what might make global literature more viable today in a world where a yard in London may not be the center of a publishing empire.
*
My job made a lot more sense to me when I realized that the problems Granta faced as a magazine and as a fiscal enterprise were intertwined. If I had to reduce them to the level of one word I would say it was this: community. The community which was entitled to be part of Granta had shrunk over the years to a very small club, something, I should point out, the English specialize in maintaining. The people who worked at the magazine; the people who wrote for the magazine, who got invited to its parties; and the readers who read and were approached by the magazine, were all of the same group. And that group was shrinking, even as it clung to power.
Financially, it was not working, this entrenchment. Not long after I joined I learned that year in and year out Granta was renting at impressive costs the lapsed subscriber lists of the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books—and you can just picture the makeup, demographically, of those lists in 2009—and our return rates for these very expensive mailings had slipped below one percent and were traveling further down. The cost of acquiring new subscribers had crept up to fifty pounds per new subscriber.
Do the math—if you lose one third of your subscribers every year, which for something like Granta amounted to around 6,500 subscribers in the UK, you were looking at a minimum marketing spend (in that one territory) of 325,000 pounds just to stay level.
Even giving the subscriptions away for free at cost would not work, because a shocking number of people who had been given those subscriptions did not renew, and then once again you were putting money into the coalface by trying to keep them.
When I learned this, I had a sudden and much greater level of respect for the posture of my former colleagues: perhaps the magazine was meant to die, and its purchase had merely artificially postponed that, like a very sick patient being transferred to a state-of-the-art hospital.
*
Ultimately, I didn’t believe that Granta’s illness was fatal, though. Mostly because I felt the English-speaking world needed Granta or a magazine like it. That to witness the world was as important as ever; that to treat writing globally without making much fanfare over that parameter being the parameter would be the best anecdote for the deformed narratives of nationalism on the rise; especially when publishing in English, where translation rates are so low; and that thanks to the amount of time people spent on the internet, to be in the world, as a place, a physical experience, needed documenting more than ever.
Granta’s Turkey cover
It was exciting, too, to be charged with finding what was new in writing, anywhere in the world. That was the culture of the magazine in its best form, that it had been a forum for what was new formally, and that it had people writing from where it was intensely important to have observers. It had just . . . I felt . . . been sidetracked. The most important thing was to change what was going into the magazine, but I knew in order to do that I’d need help. So I began to hire people. I didn’t set out to hire more diversely, but it turned out that way.
When I moved to London I met with a lot of editors, and I instantly liked Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, a Zimbabwe-born British editor at Jonathan Cape, who had shepherded works of history and fiction; in the next five years she became essentially a co-editor of the magazine, the editor on whose computer the book lived, the controller of our systems. She was also a doubt destroyer, a mind expander, and together we assembled a team of new editors who came from Nigeria via Britain, England via Japan, L.A. via Sweden and Holland, Chile, Florida, and jolly old England.
We had to work as a team, because we had a lot of work to do. When we first started at the magazine, there were just three weeks until press date for issue 107 and less than half of the book was turned in. In short order I took all the pieces I’d sent in to England to the recently departed editor and put them in. They included pieces by Mahmoud Darwish, William T. Vollmann, an essay on doctoring by Terrence Holt, to go with a book length essay by Mary Gaitskill, fiction by Kenzaburō Ōe, an essay by Javier Marías, and a fabulous long report on the roads of India by Rana Dasgupta.
The moment that issue was out of the door, though, I discovered there were just six weeks to commission, edit, and produce the next issue. Quarterly publishing seems lackadaisical, but it is surprisingly brisk if your goal is to fill 250,000 words in a magazine a year. Beyond the next issue, there were five others scheduled for the following year, 2010, and nothing—no themes, no pieces commissioned, nothing in the catalog copy that was fed out to House of Anansi Press (in Canada), Grove Atlantic (in the United States), and Allen & Unwin (in Australia). Our distributors weren’t selling the magazine well because they had no idea what they were selling. So I decided that rather than begin work on one issue, we’d begin working on four at once.
The issue schedule as made by Yuka Igarashi in the London office. Photo by John Freeman
Since it was the fall of Obama’s first election, and Chicago had a whole new generation of storytellers, making the city our next theme felt right and celebratory. I also knew it could be published with fanfare, not dribbled out of the door. In six weeks, Ellah (working partly from vacation) and I roped together contributions from Wole Soyinka, Sandra Cisneros, Aleksandar Hemon, George Saunders, and a brand-new writer named Maria Venegas who I felt was the quintessence of what Granta was—unsentimental but warm, engaged but not soap-boxing. Chris Ware designed and drew the most magnificent cover.
Launching the issue became a model for how we would treat the magazine in the future. First of all, we knew the issue would fall flat if the city was not behind it. So while I was making the issue I began flying to Chicago, once a month, for get-togethers, using air miles to get there, staying on the floor at of one of the contributors, Aleksandar Hemon’s house. Sasa, as he is called, and his wife Teri threw parties when I visited and month by month I began to meet the editors, poets, booksellers, and people who made up Chicago literary life then.
At night we drove around the city and Teri showed me places: the bar where we should have an event, the library where they could seat four hundred people for an opening launch, the radio station a friend worked at, the bookstores that stocked the best books, especially by women. Our fixer on the ground, Teri helped line up big venues (the Chicago Cultural Center), small ones (The Hideout), grand spaces (The Harold Washington Library Center), and those saturated in memory (The Rainbo Club, where we had a talk with the photographer Camilo Vegara, who shoots places over great gaps of time, capturing the way urban spaces change).
*
With someone local behind it, the issue took off, we printed 37,000 copies and when they couldn’t be distributed into Chicago fast enough we airfreighted 2,000 into the city from our JFK warehouse and then FedExed them to the office of a now defunct lit journal called Stop Smiling. Teri had the job of driving the orders to local bookstores, all over the city, while I and some of the Stop Smiling people brought the three and four hundred copy orders to the big venues by hand. Radio and TV lined up because someone there—Teri, Sasa, their friends—had read the issue and said it was worth getting behind. The city itself bought 1,000 copies—even though many of its pieces looked quite lucidly at the failures of some of its urban planning projects, racial segregation, at the cost of violence and the failure of the ward system—and still the city gave them out as gifts to hotel owners, museum presidents, university teachers.
By the time launch week kicked off we had airfreighted another 1,000 copies to Chicago, and then by the end of that week, another 1,000. We went back to press, twice, before publication date. The issue was outselling Dan Brown at local retailers. People were talking about the issue as the process of it being made had been somewhat transparent; this was not some guy in London making the call, it was me; this was not some magazine airdropping itself into town, there was a group of people who had, in essence, invited it. The Chicago issue was the fastest selling issue of Granta ever made.
*
Keeping that toot going was not possible. Much as I had dreams of cracking 50,000 print runs for each issue, I knew that what had happened in Chicago was special, and it would be special for being singular. Still, the success of the issue gave me a glimpse of what worked in small magazine publishing, in introducing writing from elsewhere to elsewhere—if you agreed nowhere should consider itself center. What worked was intimacy and warmth and openness and presence; what did not was airdropped culture, letters from an editor sitting at his desk in London to strangers asking them to subscribe. What did not work was treating readers like customers.
Writers from the Best of Brazil issue signing copies in Sao Paolo. Photo by John Freeman
It was not just that very few people got or answered their mail anymore, it had to do with all the changes of the internet and of what the internet had destroyed. People in 2009 were at once bombarded with new forms of internet marketing, they were sold to and appealed to as individuals, as purchasing agents, more than ever—for example, a Londoner that year would see 3,500 ads a day—and yet all the cultural public institutions and spaces which made them feel part of something—newspapers, bookstores, libraries—had been abandoned, declared dead, or no longer relevant to our brave new world as physical spaces.
They weren’t dead yet, though. Magazines just hadn’t figured out how to integrate the imaginary communities which the internet created, and the actual communities which exist in the real world. And since it was so much cheaper to appeal solely to the imaginary communities, people did that and basically ignored the real world. Public events were no more than token experiences for the very few, often in New York; you never asked people there to do anything more than be happy for having been invited; and at most you treated the public events as ways to harvest social media to spew out to people you didn’t know and who weren’t technically in the circle of the magazine, they were on the outside looking in.
While Ellah and I got to work, commissioning ourselves out of a hole, we began to work out a new way of publishing the magazine. Of being open, where previously it was closed and secret; of being in bookstores, not bars, or in clubs so secret there was no entrance; of creating dialogues, not monologues; of entering the university again, rather than kicking it from afar with our university-borrowed name; and of celebrating the writers rather than simply rewarding them with a small check and their name and words in Planton font. They, after all, were why we were here.
We had to muck in to do this properly. The writer Patrick Ryan, now the editor of One Story, had joined the magazine as the Chicago issue was coming out and found himself doubling as a shipping clerk, getting issues to various newsstands and libraries across the city. He also brought a much-needed writer-centric way of taking care of who he published, and how we treated their copy, especially writing in translation. Meantime, Yuka Igarashi became part of the editorial team in London, and thanks to her influence the magazine would eventually publish its first issue on Japan in 2014. Finally, Ted Hodgkinson came on as our online editor, bringing a consistency and depth to what we were doing on the web. On his watch we began partnering with translation prizes; we began publishing new fiction and poetry and nonfiction from around the world daily.
So much of what any magazine is comes from its visual culture, too. How it lives in the world, how it represents, who it represents, how it moves. When I started, Granta was spending upwards of 60,000 pounds a year on design and advertising fees. All of this work could be done in house if we had an art director, someone to integrate all the various visual iterations of Granta, and there would in fact be money left over to hire an in-house publicist, someone to create a narrative for each issue based on events, press, and social media outreach. And so, at Ellah’s prompting, we met and hired Michael Salu, a former art director at Random House, who promptly renovated the magazine’s approach to covers with the sex issue. It was interactive, it acknowledged the reader, it was playful.
The event launch was hosted at a luxury kink shop in London called Coco de Mer, followed by events at their stores in New York and Los Angeles. The buzz around the issue, prompted by the cover, was heavy and funny. Largely, too, because Coco de Mer had a brilliant social media coordinator, Saskia Vogel, a Victorian sexuality Ph.D. student and fiction writer from L.A. via Holland and Sweden who spoke five languages and who had previously edited a trade magazine for the porn industry.
When I found out she was a fan of Granta, it felt like a sign from fate that she should join us.
With Michael and Saskia aboard, the magazine transformed so rapidly you could hear people regard its change. By the middle of that year, we had come up with a benchmark for each launch: ten events per issue; five in America, five in Britain; a profile of one of our writers in a major weekly newspaper; radio; and digital content to build up to and trail the issue so that we were preparing our readers for what was about to come.
*
The changes happened so suddenly even now it’s a little strange to realize we pulled it off. When I started, we had one event per issue, usually at a pub in London, if I had begged. By 2013 we were putting on more than a hundred events a year across five continents, often assisted by the British Council and other arts organizations; our covers had won design awards; the magazine was a habitué of the Best American series and while it had been shrunk down we were back up to a 50,000 print run for the Best of British issue, which featured writers from Kamila Shamsie to Sunjeev Sahota, Ross Raisin to Nadifa Mohamed. Within four years we were doing more than ever, and thanks to a lot of help from a new finance director who went through cost after cost with me, we were also losing half of what we once were.
We had also launched a dozen new editions of the magazine in translation, in countries ranging from Norway to Japan to Brazil, Bulgaria to Finland, Portugal and Italy, and once a year this braintrust of editors would gather and talk about writers we liked. Out of these collaborations I was able to read early work from Sayaka Murata, Daniel Galera, Lina Wolff, Matteo B. Bianchi, Samanta Schweblin, Valério Romão, and so many others. Happily, at one of these meetings, editors from various editions began to pair off and compare notes and trade contacts, from Bulgaria to Japan, Italy to Denmark. A number of these editions of Granta are still running and have become launchpads for careers in those countries. When I launched Freeman’s five years ago one of my first goals was to restart an ecosystem like this, and without the publishers in Italy (Edizioni Black Coffee), Romania (Black Button Books), China (Archipel Press), and Sweden (Polaris) it wouldn’t have continued.
*
Back then, at Granta, all of this was made possible by inverting the way the magazine had thought about community. Community was not a network on the ground we could exploit for sales or the ruffians we had to keep out of the gates; community was something we could make ourselves part of if we joined in mindfully. Community was not something meant to look up to us; community could tell us things we did not know—which writers were good, which venues were worth visiting—only if we were part of it and in a fair exchange. Community was not the end of British, American, or high culture; it would be the next step. Community was not crowdsourcing the determination of what was good writing; it was expanding our notion of what was good so that it could be more inclusive. In so being, Granta wound up with more readers and at the cusp, again, of where great writing happens. It was a lot of work and one of the happiest periods of my life thanks to the people I got to do it with, the writing I read for the first time, and the pleasure of working with writers who expanded the world one sentence at a time.
