Collaborations

I have developed and prototyped two complementary approaches to making book contents available online: Look Inside the Book for consumer-facing websites, and a Full Text archive for scholarly use. Both of them build on the open source Manifold platform developed by Cast Iron Coding, with architecture and design by Andy Pressman.

Look Inside the Book uses entitlements to grant access to some or all of each book, with a permeable paywall that encourages sharing links to any chosen passage or chapter. This will facilitate word-of mouth and online discovery, boosting reach and sales. Allowing all readers access to some of the book will better inform their decision to purchase, increasing conversion rates.

Full Text will ensure that an entire archive of ebooks is fully available to scholars and students – via OCLC, WorldCat and library portals – without the problems and restrictions caused by the prevailing library ebook sales model. Sales and marketing outreach would be to scholars, teachers, and digital librarians, to make as much of the archive available as possible via institutional subscription or purchase. Books can be listed and discussed on courses with any number of students, without “single copy, single use” restrictions or DRM, facilitating more discussion and citations, boosting readership and sales.

The history of political pamphlets in the UK and US shows that this is a popular form that can have substantial political and intellectual impact, and I’ve long thought that a digital-first approach could build on that. In 2019, Verso published Feminism for the 99%, Nancy Fraser’s The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born, and Andrea Long Chu’s Females (now out in a new edition). In 2020, we crashed out a pamphlet series on Covid, led by Andreas Malm’s Corona, Climate, and Chronic Emergency – an ideal type of a 21st-century political pamphlet, by the foremost thinker (and the best writer) on the climate crisis. I also launched the Verso Book Club, both print and digital, which quickly grew to five thousand subscribers. In 2024, I worked with Michal Shatz to bring out the Palestine Pamphlets, publishing the ebooks first and selling in the print editions at the same time.

The Jacobin book series started in the same year as Verso’s direct-to-consumer sales, and showed that it was possible to use D2C (and good marketing) to launch new writers who would otherwise get passed over by bookstore buyers – Melissa Gira Grant and Peter Frase went on to sell tens of thousands of copies, along with Ben Kunkel’s Utopia or Bust and Samuel Stein’s Capital City. After ten years as a paperback series, Jacobin started publishing in hardcover with Adolph Reed’s acclaimed history of Jim Crow, The South, and Benjamin Yen-Yi Fong’s Quick Fixes.

The first solely online magazine to break out from the New York scene, founded by Rachel Rosenfelt, New Inquiry collaborated with Verso when it had to move from Amazon’s payment platform. Verso went on to work with Evan Calder Williams and Viewpoint magazine, and to publish Natasha Lennard. The short-lived “rhetorical software” collective known as Dark Inquiry launched the White Collar Crime app developed by Sam Lavigne, with whom Verso had published an “edited” Encyclical by the late Pope Francis.

Many of these collaborations grew out of the Occupy Wall Street movement, though Verso’s work with n+1 predated OWS by a few years. Flattered by n+1’s critical assessment of Verso’s long-running Radical Thinkers series, I set out on an only partially successful, decade-long campaign to publish the best of Benjamin Kunkel’s non-fiction writing. n+1’s Occupy! gazette led to a chance to work with Keith Gessen, Dayna Tortorici, and Stephen Squibb on Occupy!, which went to press on the night that NYPD cleared Zucotti Park.

When I began to study Verso Books while working at New Left Review, I was immediately struck by a structural problem with the book industry. Book publishers are, traditionally, B2B wholesalers whose primary sales relationship is with book retailers, from Amazon and Barnes & Noble to independent bookstores. Because of that, most publishers have little direct contact with their readership and usually don’t know who they are. My aim was to change that for Verso Books, and build a successful D2C channel that would then be able to inform Verso’s trade publishing, publicity, marketing, and sales.

In trying to think like a magazine as a book publisher, I have been beyond fortunate in finding and being able to work with the brilliant and talented cohort of magazines, websites, editors and writers referred to above. Throughout this period, my closest collaboration has been with – to put it as modestly as I can – the most talented designer working at the intersection of print and digital, Andy Pressman. I would not have been able to flesh out a digital first or tech-forward approach to book publishing – certainly one that looked as good and worked as well – without this central collaboration.

Whatever happens to the book industry, the intellectual and social role of the book-length argument will endure. My work in publishing – in making book-length arguments public – has attempted to present those arguments across different media, in order to find a popular readership wherever they might be. In doing so, I have worked to demonstrate consistently high standards for design, prose, and production – in print, and online.