The Hogarth Press's plan for selling books

A friend who is an author was talking about selling books. It’s a subject I know nothing about.

My friend has talked to consultants who offer services for marketing books through social media. 

The discussion reminded me of The Publish-It-Yourself Handbook: Literary Tradition & How-To, edited by Bill Henderson, founder of Pushcart Press. It was published in 1980. It is a reminder that the story that self-publishing got started with the Internet isn’t entirely true.

Henderson traces a long line of self-publishers: Blake, Shelley, Byron, Poe, Whitman, Twain, Crane, Joyce. You have to wonder what literature courses would be like if they featured only the writers who got their start with major publishers.

The book has a couple of dozen accounts of people who set up small presses.

One of my favorites is an essay by Leonard Woolf about how he and his famous wife, Virginia, set up Hogarth Press in their dining room in 1917.

They began with Two Stories — one by Leonard and one by Virginia — in a 32-page pamphlet. They set type by hand. They stitched the pamphlets together by hand. That first pamphlet included an advertisement for the new publishing company, which proposed to print material that hadn’t a prayer of being published anywhere else.

In the next few years, Hogarth Press published Poems by T.S. Elliott, Story of the Siren by E.M. Forster and a translation of Reminiscences of Tolstoi by Maxim Gorky.

Leonard Woolf’s essay, extracted from his book Beginning Again, makes two points for self-publishers.

• “I have often heard it said by professional publishers and others who know the book producing and book selling business far better than I do that it would be impossible today to do what we did in 1917 to 1927 …” I think people in the business say the same thing decade after decade. The reasons change with the technology.

• “One reason the Press survived was because for many years our object was, not to expand, but to keep it small.” Sales of those now-famous titles generally ran around 150 books.

The lesson Leonard Woolf learned: keep your overhead low and publish what you want.

The lesson I learned involves that number, 150. If you think you have a story to tell, start small. Print 150 copies — not 5,000. Give them to friends. Send them to newspapers. Word will either spread or it won’t. Readers will do that, not the author.