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The FC2 Story   Location & Operation   Life Cycle of FC2 Book  Support 

 

 

THE FICTION COLLECTIVE STORY

by Jeffrey DeShell and R. M. Berry

I

The Fiction Collective began in 1973, when Jonathan Baumbach, Peter Spielberg, Mark Mirsky, Steve Katz, Ronald Sukenick and others (some participating via phone from California and Colorado) began to meet in Baumbach’s Brooklyn apartment to discuss the possibility of founding a cooperative fiction publishing venture.  They felt annoyed, dismayed and discouraged by the severe editorial and marketing limitations of the commercial presses — what Spielberg calls “literature defined by a committee, books designed by cereal packagers, marketed by used-car salesmen . . . and ruled or overruled by accountants”- but they wanted to do something more than just create another marginalized small press.  All present had experienced the frustration of seeing their critically praised fiction go out of print, and some were having difficulty finding a publisher for subsequent books.  As Baumbach recalled: "At our early meetings we analyzed the commercial publishing scene by sharing negative anecdotes....  Fiction that redefined the rules, innovative and experimental work, was having the most trouble finding a home in what was clearly (though unacknowledged) a publishing establishment increasingly attuned to the bottom line."  There was broad agreement about the need for writers to take the authority of publishing into their own hands, but everyone was worried about the practical obstacles.  Finally, after lengthy discussion, they decided to act.  As Katz writes:

This was going to be a statement, strong writers taking their careers in their own hands.  Blast into the face of the compromised publishing establishment. If we published our own books we could not be blown out by commercial winds, the fickleness of popular culture.  We could exercise some control over how our books came into the world.  We spent a good deal of time deciding what to call the enterprise.  We didn't want it to seem to be a "cooperative," whatever that implied.  And we certainly didn't want it to appear as a vanity press.  No vanity, just artistic and editorial rigor.  The idea was to be that we chose to step outside the establishment.  We were going to edit each other's books, a practice that actually went on for a few years.  Help each other.  Make a literature.  Occasionally we would publish a promising new writer. We decided on the name "Fiction Collective" as a kind of compromise.  The books would come out in a uniform format,like Gallimard volumes, or Penguin books.  An idea that I liked was that we originally thought to limit our membership to a modest dozen or so, and encourage other groups of writers to form their own collectives. 
After the name "Fiction Collective" was chosen, Spielberg and Baumbach met with the Provost of Brooklyn College to secure office space and mailing privileges.  The group formulated an editorial protocol whereby books would be accepted for publication by simple majority vote.  Six books a year were planned, and the first three—Museum by B. H. Friedman, Reruns by Baumbach and Twiddledum Twaddledum by Spielberg--were accepted and edited (Spielberg edited Baumbach, Baumbach edited Friedman and Friedman edited Spielberg).  An artist was found who designed a logo.  Next came the difficult chore of finding a distributor.  As Baumbach tells it:
I went around with Spielberg (and sometimes with Mark Mirsky and Jerome Charyn) interviewing potential distributors.  The head of one distinguished publishing house, initially interested in the possibility of distributing our books, woke up one morning (so it was reported to us) furious at the idea of the Fiction Collective.  “Who do they think they are?” he said, or was reported to have said.  “We publish all the good fiction that comes our way.  There isn’t any worthy fiction not getting published.”  It was an attitude we would encounter, directly and obliquely, again and again.
Ironically, it was this anger— by writers, editors and publishers—that gave the Fiction Collective a sense of credibility and importance.  There was the feeling that, if the Collective could inspire such fury, it must be doing something right. Finally, George Braziller, a small but influential distributor of European fiction, agreed to distribute the books, and in fall of 1974 the first Fiction Collective book appeared on the shelf of a bookstore.

In his New York Times Book Review "Guest Word" for September 15, 1974, early collectivist Ronald Sukenick explained the group's plan:

The Fiction Collective will make serious novels and story collections available in simultaneous hard and quality paper editions...and will keep them in print permanently.  The Collective is not a publishing house, but a "not-for-profit" cooperative..., the first of its kind in this country, in which writers make all business decisions and do all editorial and copy work."
Sukenick's "Guest Word" became a manifesto for the Collective and its supporters. In addition to explaining the practical operation of the Collective, it offered a diagnosis of the current publishing industry ("a mass market industry that cannot afford to produce small, reasonably priced editions of quality fiction") and outlined the Collectivists' vision of "a community and audience of the kind that has always sustained poetry." He concluded:
For American novelists, the publisher has played the role of unacknowledged father, boss and sugar-daddy, whose recognition legitimizes one's identity as a writer. The Fiction Collective offers recognition by one's peers. This clear insistence on the standards of those who, finally, know what the art is all about, opens a path toward the maturity of the American novel, as well as a way for American novelists to assume their full prerogatives and responsibilities.
During the Collective's early years, the critical reception for its books was sometimes mixed but rarely lukewarm. The first season's offerings received lengthy, favorable reviews in The New Republic, Newsweek, The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, and The American Poetry Review.  The Washington Post listed Baumbach's Reruns as a notable book of the year, and the Quality Paperback Club presented the first three Collective books as a Special Selection.  Over forty-five periodicals either reviewed the Fiction Collective's first series or ran news stories on the Collective itself, and over the next six years lengthy critical essays on the Collective were published in Contemporary Literature, Partisan Review, The Chicago Review, and elsewhere.  At the same time negative responses to the Collective or its books were sometimes marked by extraordinary animus.  Michael Mewshaw in the October 13, 1974 New York Times Book Review, complained about the books' prices, number of pages, and printing errors, and spent several paragraphs listing phrases Mewshaw considered "clunkers and cliches."  Gene Lyons in a 1978 Triquarterly article pronounced the Collective a failure, dismissing it as "a well-publicized, tax-supported vanity press," and a Sewanee Review editorial characterized the collectivists as a group of naive young writers who "must feed themselves upon the illusion of heroic struggle."  Such polarized responses, often focusing as much on the Collective itself as on the books it published, would characterize reaction to the Fiction Collective throughout much of its history.

For most of its first fifteen years the Fiction Collective published three new works of non-traditional fiction each fall and spring. Among the books published by the Collective during this period were: Ronald Sukenick’s 98.6, Russell Banks’ Searching for Survivors, Marianne Hauser's The Talking Room, Ursule Molinaro's Encores for a Dilettante, Raymond Federman's Take It or Leave It, Steve Katz's Stolen Stories, Clarence Major's My Amputations, Fanny Howe's Holy Smoke, Harold Jaffe's Mole's Pity, Mark Leyner's I Smell Esther Williams, and Gerald Vizenor's Griever: An American Monkey King in China.  The Collective was praised by Robert Coover, Anais Nin, Jerome Klinkowitz, and others, and it received regular support from the New York State Council for the Arts and the NEA. In 1984 co-director Curtis White organized a national contest to find and publish new writers of innovative fiction.

II

By the mid 1980's the Collective had published over forty writers, each subsequently becoming a member, and this success had ironically made the organization too cumbersome for collective decision-making and management.  Also, reductions in arts funding during the Reagan administration were making support harder to find.  In 1986 the Collective's grant application to the NEA was denied, and within a year it began to have difficulty publishing books.  As Curt White and Ronald Sukenick later recalled:

At this time, the Collective was directed by Mark Leyner, Rachel Salazar, and Curt White.  The involvement of the University of Colorado, Boulder, was growing through its Nilon Prize for Excellence in Minority Ficiton, as was the participation of Illinois State University through its National Fiction Competition.  And yet things were not well.  The Fiction Collective had reached a point where it had exhausted most of the collectivist energies of its origins.  The people upon whom most of the responsibilities fell were becoming more frustrated with their lack of any real authority.  Beyond the contests, the Fiction Collective had essentially ceased to exist.

In the winter of 1989, Curtis White, Ronald Sukenick, Mark Leyner, Jonathan Baumbach, B. H. Friedman, and Peter Spielberg met in Spielberg's Brooklyn apartment and, after lengthy discussion, finally reached the decision to reorganize the press.  The constitution was rewritten, creating Fiction Collective Two, a non-profit, author-run press under a governing board of directors, with Sukenick as board chair and White as managing director.  Editorial responsibilities were divided between two offices, one at the University of Colorado at Boulder run by Don Laing and another at Illinois State University in Normal run by White.

Over the next years White and Sukenick went to work to professionalize the organization, creating a better quality book design and making the first systematic efforts at promotion and marketing.  Soon a new imprint was launched, Black Ice Books, modeled on the Semiotext(e) Autonomedia series, with Mark Amerika’s The Kafka Chronicles, Cris Mazza’s Revelation Countdown, Samuel Delany's Hogg, and John Shirley’s New Noir.  Designed to be, as White described it, “a merging of the avant-garde with the popular," Black Ice Books' "avant-pop" aesthetic was immediately successful, enjoying national review attention and lively sales.   The press also enjoyed the success of several impressive Nilon Prize winners, such as Diane Glancy (Trigger Dance), Yvonne Sapia (Valentino's Hair), and Ricardo Cortez Cruz (Straight Outa Comptom). During the first years of the Clinton administration, the press began once again to receive generous NEA support, and in 1995 FC2 contracted with Northwestern University Press for distribution.  Later characterizing the early nineties as a period of financial stability and artistic excitement, White and Sukenick would emphasize FC2's continuity of purpose with the original Collective: "to be a showcase for the nonconventional in the context of an aggressive independence from mainstream publishing."

In the mid nineties the University of Colorado office closed, and all FC2 operations were transferred to the Unit for Contemporary Literature at Illinois State University, a publications center organized by Charles Harris and responsible for The American Book Review. Curtis White became effective manager of the press, still under the oversight of a governing board now composed of Sukenick, Robert Steiner, Richard Grossman, Cris Mazza, and White himself. During this period the Illinois Arts Council joined the NEA in becoming a major supporter of the press.

Once again, however, action by the Republican right jeopardized the press's existence. In December, 1996, Representative Peter Hoekstra (R., Michigan) obtained a copy of Chick Lit 2, an FC2 anthology of new women's writing published with NEA funds, and discovered in one of the eighteen stories a description of sexual relations between two women.  As chair of the congressional Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Hoekstra immediately organized an inquiry into the NEA's support of FC2.  In a 1997 letter to Jane Alexander, NEA chair, Hoekstra cited four FC2 books that contained materials "most of which are an offense to the senses of this Subcommittee."  During the subsequent hearings, FC2 received outspoken support from such writers as Mark Strand, William Gass, and Tony Morrison.  However, as of this writing (August, 2000) all subsequent FC2 applications for NEA support have been denied.

Despite these political difficulties and their financial repercussions, FC2 continued throughout the nineties to publish its groundbreaking books. Among the books of this period were Evan Dara's The Lost Scrapbook, Kenneth Bernard’s From the District File, Jacques Servin’s Aviary Slag, Omar S. Castaneda’s Learning to Say ‘Mouth’ or ‘Face,’ as well as various anthologies: Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction and Chick-Lit Two: No Chick Vics, edited by Cris Mazza, Jeffrey DeShell and Elisabeth Sheffield;  Latino Heretics, edited by Tony Diaz; and Degenerative Prose, edited by Mark Amerika and Ronald Sukenick.


In 1999, Curtis White stepped down from his position as managing director of FC2.  White, who had seen the press through its darkest financial days, succeeded in leaving the press in good economic health, partly due to a sale of Fiction Collective and FC2 archives to the University of Texas at Austin.  FC2 authors R.M. Berry and Jeffrey DeShell presented a new proposal to the governing board for operation of the press, in which Berry and DeShell became acting publishers for FC2, a new position with increased editorial responsibility. In May 1999, the executive offices of the press were moved to the English Department at Florida State University where Berry was a faculty member. The editorial board was reorganized under the oversight of Cris Mazza at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and book producton remained at the ISU Unit for Contemporary Literature. At present, FC2 is generously supported by Florida State University, Illinois State University, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs.

At the end of its first quarter century of operation, the Fiction Collective and its successor FC2 have published over one hundered fifty books by more than eighty individuals.  Its operations have been located on five university campuses.  In addition to articles already mentioned, the press has been the subject of articles in Publisher's Weekly, Poets & Writers, Critique, Triquarterly, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.  Most of its original membership continues to publish with FC2 and to take an active part in the press operation.   All business and editorial decisions continue to be made by the authors.  Virtually all Fiction Collective and FC2 titles are still in print. 

LOCATION AND OPERATION

FC2 presently has offices at three universities, and its membership spreads throughout the United States and Europe.  It publishes six new books annually, three in fall, three in spring, and it reprints up to four books a year.  All publication is fiction. Average press run is 2200. Normally, publication is paper only, although occasional books appear in simultaneous paper and cloth edition or in cloth only. 

FC2 executive offices are located in the Department of English, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306-1580 (850-644-2260 / fc2@english.fsu.edu / FAX 850-644-6808).  The FC2 managing editor, Brenda Mills, and the acting publisher, R. M. Berry have offices here.  All decisions regarding press operation, book promotion and marketing are made in coordination with the FSU office, and the press functions at other universities are coordinated and supervised from this office. 

The FC2 book production office is in the Unit for Contemporary Literature, 109 Fairchild Hall, Illinois State University, Normal, IL 61790-4241 (309-438-3025).  Here future FC2 books are layed out and prepared for printing by the Unit production manager, Tara Reeser, and her staff.  Also, unsolicited manuscripts are accepted and given their initial reading in this office. 

The FC2 editorial board is operated by Cris Mazza at the Dept of English, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607-7120.  The editorial board consists of between five and seven FC2 authors, located throughout the country, each of whom reads and reports on up to twelve manuscripts a year.  For a manuscript to be published by FC2 it must be read by a minimum of three board members and must receive three yes votes before receiving two no votes.   Manuscripts reach the editorial board either by being selected through the open submission process at Illinois State University or by being sponsored by an FC2 member.  Also, all FC2 author-members can submit their own work directly to the editorial board. 

The FC2 distributor is Northwestern University Press, 625 Colfax Street, Evanston, IL 60208-4210 (847-491-8114; FAX: 847-491-8150).  The distributor lists new FC2 books in its catalogue and provides marketing, sales, and order fulfillment for all FC2 books.  The Northwestern publicists also collaborate with FC2's publicist in promotion and publicity.


 


LIFE CYCLE OF AN FC2 BOOK

FC2 is always recruiting new members. In the past it has held two separate manuscript competitions to attract them, the national Fiction Competition, and the Charles N. and Mildred Nilon Award for Excellence in Minority Fiction.  Although both contests are temporarily suspended, plans are underway to revive them on some future occasion.  Of the 47 books FC2 published between 1989 and 1995, 28 of the authors were new to the collective, and 20 were publishing their first books.

A manuscript can reach the collective in one of three ways. 
1) Manuscripts can come to the Unit for Contemporary Literature, which accepts and reads open submissions twelve months a year.   Manuscripts are initially screened by Unit staff.  Those which seem most promising are sent to R. M. Berry, Jeffrey DeShell or a designated FC2 author-member for a final screening.  The Unit receives between 200 and 300 submissions annually.  Approximately 1 in 20 is forwarded to the editorial board.
2) Manuscripts can be sponsored by FC2 author-members.  Anyone who has in the past had a book accepted for publication by FC2 automatically becomes a member of the collective, and as a privilege of membership, she can send work directly to Cris Mazza for consideration by the editorial board.  The editorial board receives 15-20 sponsored manuscripts annually.
3) All FC2 author-members (i.e., individuals whose work has in the past been accepted for publication by FC2) can send their own work directly to Cris Mazza for consideration by the editorial board.  The editorial board receives 3-6 submissions from FC2 authors annually.


At the editorial board every manuscript is read by at least two board members.  Board members can cast one of three votes: to publish, to reject, or to return the manuscript to the author for revisions.  Vote sheets also ask for critical comments and detailed suggestions.  Any manuscript that receives at least one vote to publish is also read by the acting publishers, either R. M. Berry or Jeffrey DeShell or both.  For a manuscript to be accepted, it must receive three votes to publish before receiving two rejections.  Any manuscript rejected by two members of the editorial board or the publishers is returned and will not be reconsidered.

The editorial board reads 35-50 manuscripts annually.  It accepts for publication approximately six a year.  Of the ten novels and story collections scheduled for publication between spring 1999 and fall 2000, four were by previous FC2 authors and six were by authors who had never before published with FC2. 

When a manuscript is accepted by the editorial board, the acting publisher and new author sign a contract, and the author begins work on any revisions suggested by the manuscript's readers. 

FC2 contracts to publish the new work within eighteen months of the signed contract, but publication normally occurs in half that time.  Approximately six months before publication the cover is designed and sales copy is written for the Northwestern UP catalogue.  The book goes into active production four to six months before publication, at which time a final copy of the revised manuscript, hard copy and diskette, are due at the production offices at the Unit for Contemporary Literature. 

During the four to six months prior to publication, the Unit staff enters the manuscript into Adobe Pagemaker and determines all formatting and design parameters.   The  formatted versions of the manuscript are read at intervals by the author, the publisher and a professional proofreader.   Approximately four months before publication, uncorrected galleys are sent to a galley-maker for binding and, upon return, are distributed to major review publications by the Northwestern and FC2 publicists. 

Two months before publication the completely formatted and proofread manuscript is sent, both on diskette and as hardcopy, to the printer.  The printer produces the finished book in approximately four weeks, shipping 80 copies to the FC2 executive office at FSU, 25 copies to the author, and the remainder to the Central Distribution Center (i.e., warehouse) in Chicago. The warehouse requires 2-3 weeks to process the books for shipment to wholesalers and stores.

Three weeks after arrival at the warehouse, the book is published.  At this point promotion and publicity become the principal activity.   These efforts are coordinated by the FC2 publicist at FSU and the Northwestern UP publicist in Chicago.   Press kits are sent to prospective reviewers and editors, and the media are notified of any author appearances or book signings.   Review publications which earlier received bound galleys are now sent copies of the completed book. 

Approximately six months after publication the book appears again in the Northwestern catalogue as a "recently published" book, and then once more approximately six months later.   At this point it retires to the FC2 backlist, receiving occasional feature coverage on the FC2 website or in the "selected backlist" section of the Northwestern catalogue.   As a backlisted book, the work remains available from the distributor or through the website indefinitely. 
 
 

PUBLICATIONS, PROMOTION, MARKETING



FC2 is supported in part by Florida State University, the State of Florida Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Arts Council, the Illinois Arts Council, Illinois State University, the National Endowment for the Arts, and by numerous generous private contributors.

Number of books: 6 - 10 annually. 
Last year (99-00) we published 6 new books and reissued 4. This year (00-01) we will publish 6 new books and reissue 1. Since its founding in 1974, the press (the Fiction Collective, Fiction Collective 2, and the FC2 imprint Black Ice Books) has published over 140 books. 

Size of press runs: 2000  
Press runs vary. Over the last three years, runs have been as low as 1200 and as high as 5000. 2000 is normal. The press normally publishes paperback originals only. However, occasional titles appear in both cloth and paper editions. 

Reputable authors published/awards: 
Three FC2 authors (Clarence Major, Gerald Vizenor, Diane Glancy) are represented in the most recent Norton Anthology of American Literature (Vol II, 5th ed: 1998). Five FC2 authors (Curtis White, Ricardo Cortez Cruz, Gerald Vizenor, Mark Leyner, Samuel Delany) are represented in Postmodern Literature: A Norton Anthology (1997). 

Numerous FC2 authors (e.g., Ronald Sukenick, Raymond Federman, Clarence Major, Fanny Howe, Marianne Hauser, Russell Banks) have been the subject of essays in scholarly journals such as Contemporary Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Critique, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Chicago Review. 

Articles about the press itself have been published in Poets and Writers, Contemporary Literature, Triquarterly, Critique, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Michael Bérubé's The Employment of English (NYU press, 1998). 

A few of the awards and honors which our books and authors have received are: The Western Book Award (Clarence Major's My Amputations), the American Book Award (Gerald Vizenor's Griever: An American Monkey King in China), the BEA Firecracker Award (Rob Hardin's Distorture), PEN West finalist (Richard Grossman, The Alphabet Man). 

In recent years The Nation cited Ricardo Cortez Cruz's Straight Outta Compton as a "best of the year," Publisher's Weekly gave "top twenty" designations to Yvonne Sapia's Valentino's Hair and Ivan Webster's Cares of the Day, the Village Voice Literary Supplement listed Richard Grossman's Book of Lazarus among its top twenty-five books of 1997, and The New York Times Book Review included R. M. Berry's Leonardo's Horse among its "notable books" of 1998. 

The Fiction Collective and FC2 have received numerous grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, and the Illinois Arts Council, and have received support from Brooklyn College, the University of Colorado, Illinois State University, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Florida State University. 

Reviews: 
Reviews of FC2 books regularly appear in such publications as: The London Times Literary Supplement, New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Village Voice, Washington Post Book World, The Nation, The Wall Street Journal, Rain Taxi, New Novel Review, Bloomsbury Review, Boston Book Review, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, The American Book Review.

Editorial process (vetting): 
FC2 selects for publication from 4-8 MSS each year from a total pool of submissions of 200 to 300 MSS. 

FC2 presently employs a three-tiered editorial structure: 
1) Unsolicited submissions are read by staff at the Unit for Contemporary Literature at Illinois State University. The most promising of these are forwarded to our Editorial Board. 
2) The FC2 editorial board consists of five readers, all of whom are authors formerly published by FC2. In addition to MSS forwarded by the Unit staff, the editorial board reviews MSS forwarded by other FC2 authors. 
3) The two acting publishers (R. M. Berry and Jeffrey DeShell) cast the final vote on all MSS submitted to the press. 

Every submission receives from three to six readings. To be published, a MS must receive three "yes" votes before it receives two "no" votes from editorial board members and/or the publishers. Any MS receiving two "no" votes is rejected. 

Distribution and Marketing: 
FC2 books are distributed by Northwestern University Press and are available to bookstores through the principal US book wholesalers (Ingram, Baker and Taylor, etc). FC2 books are regularly sold by the principal national bookstore chains (Barnes and Noble, Borders, etc.) as well as by the largest and best-known independent bookstores (e.g., Prairie Lights Books/Iowa City, City Lights Books/SF, Shaman Drum Bookstore/Ann Arbor). All FC2 books can be purchased directly from this website or from Amazon.com. 

FC2 books, in English and translation, are also available throughout Europe and in parts of Asia. 
DISTRIBUTION
Northwestern University Press
625 Colfax Street
Evanston, Illinois 60208-4210
Phone 800-621-2736
BUSINESS AND EDITORIAL OFFICES
Department of English, Florida State University
Tallahassee, Florida 32306-1580
Phone 850-644-2260
Email fc2@english.fsu.edu
PRODUCTION OFFICE
Unit for Contemporary Literature
109 Fairchild Hall
Illinois State University
Normal, Illinois 61790-4241


 

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